


place the moon at my eyes (and her whiteness shall devour)

by diasterisms



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (It's Set In What's Basically The Philippines So Catholicism Abounds), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Animal Death, Body Horror, Drinking, Exes, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Fetal Cannibalism, Getting Back Together, Ghosts, Gore, Horror, Insects, Lynch Mobs, Minor Character Death, Murder, Philippine Superstitions & Folklore, Pregnancy, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Wakes & Funerals, anthropophagy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2020-11-08 05:41:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20830325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diasterisms/pseuds/diasterisms
Summary: "It's what people do around here— they tell ghost stories."





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, all! This is my entry for [Amid Secrets and Monsters: The 2019 Reylo Fanfiction Anthology](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Amid_Secrets_and_Monsters), with the monster in question being the _aswang_— perhaps one of the most enduring pillars of old belief systems in my homeland, the Philippines, and certainly one of the first supernatural entities that every Filipino kid born and raised here learns about. Please do **mind the tags** as some darker themes will be touched upon owing to the nature of the subject matter; [here is the Wikipedia entry for the _aswang_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aswang), which should give you a better idea of what's in store.
> 
> Like most of my other Modern AUs, this fic takes place somewhere that isn't our world, per se, but is more like if GFFA locations were all smushed into one Earth-adjacent planet, the fictional country of Alderaan in particular cobbled together from various Philippine settings. This story is already finished and I will be posting the remaining four chapters whenever time permits— on a desktop or mobile browser, you can check the sidebar of [my blog](https://kylorenvevo.tumblr.com/) for the ETA of the next update.
> 
> I'm so happy that I finally get to share this little piece of my culture with you guys and I hope you all enjoy this wild ride! Many thanks to RFFA mods [Vivien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vivien) and [crossingwinter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter) for making it readable xD Feedback would be much appreciated! And, lastly, to all the Filipino Reylos reading this, LEZGO MGA SIS LOLA BREHA FTW ❤️

From Sanctuary Coast they took the ferry to Chianar, a crowded voyage because, like so many of Alderaan's tinier islands, Sanctuary Coast had no airport and traveling by sea was the only viable way of getting to and fro. The little white boat seemed to bob worryingly low amidst the azure waves, its passenger compartment swelling with the chatter of locals and tourists alike, packed tightly together like sardines as the vessel lurched unsteadily with each rolling current, metal groaning under the weight of too much cargo.

It was, quite frankly, a wrongful death lawsuit waiting to happen, but Ben knew that this was par for the course for his mother's country. On his first visit to Chianar twenty-five years ago, he'd seen ten people crammed into a tricycle meant to carry four at most, puttering down the highway while gargantuan AA-9 bus liners and cargo trucks loaded with sugarcane roared past.

Ben was a visitor again now, along with Rey, Finn, Rose, Poe, and Paige, the six of them sporting varying degrees of sunburn from the week they'd spent on the picture-perfect beaches of Sanctuary Coast. Their Western Hemisphere English drew curious glances from nearby Alderaanians—or, at least, Finn, Poe, and the Tico sisters were the ones engaged in boisterous conversation. Ben and Rey were markedly silent in contrast; seated up front as they were, they could get away with not letting any part of their bodies touch while their friends remained none the wiser behind them. In their room at the rented villa on Sanctuary Coast, they'd slept in separate beds at night while acting like everything was fine during the day. The others didn't appear to suspect a thing, so they were probably doing a good job of it.

It was torture for Ben to be in such close quarters with his ex. He darted a sidelong glance at Rey from behind black-tinted Persol shades and there it was again, his heart catching in his throat. She was leaning against the window, her profile framed by sunlit blue waters dotted with the green crags of faraway islands; Even though her eyes were hidden by over-sized coppery aviators, he knew she was staring out to sea. It was something she never got sick of, which was why he'd tacked Sanctuary Coast onto their itinerary when his grandparents invited him, his friends, and his girlfriend to spend three weeks at the Organa estate in Chianar. Rey had been so damn _ happy _when he showed her the plane tickets—hell, she'd gone down on her knees right there in the kitchen where they'd been eating breakfast and given him the most enthusiastic blowjob he'd ever received as he clutched at the marble countertop for dear life.

But that had been six months ago. They'd broken up the week before their flight to Alderaan and now here they were, pretending to still be together while he thought about how he would never feel those pretty pink lips on his dick ever again.

It was—well, it was goddamn _ depressing, _that was what it was, and it added to Ben's terrible mood as he sweltered in the ferry's weak air-conditioning and tried to shift to a more comfortable position in a seat that could barely accommodate his wide, six-foot-two frame, every inch of sun-burnt skin aching in protest at each slight movement. Everything was too small on these too-sunny islands, but he'd have gladly endured all of it if Rey hadn't—if they were still—

Something jabbed at his ankle. Ben glanced down to see a sharp beak poking out of one of the airholes punched into a cardboard box.

"Sorry," the man seated next to him muttered, bending down to move the box further away as its contents emitted an outraged cluck.

_ I've just been stabbed in the foot by a chicken, _ Ben thought in a heat-addled daze. _ A chicken in a box. On a boat. _

Out of the corner of his eye, Rey's mouth curved into a smirk at his predicament, but she said nothing.

*

Another hour crawled by and then—_ finally— _they were dropping anchor, they were retrieving their luggage, they were walking out of the ferry and down the gangplank and into the blazing afternoon sun that poured over Chianar's docks in a golden haze. Ben and the rest of his group huddled together amidst the throng of families reuniting, tourists scrambling for rides to the airport, locals making a beeline towards the jeepneys clustered at the port entrance, and vendors plying their wares—everything from food to balloons to wallets to pirated DVDs.

It was a _madhouse,_ and Rey, Poe, and the Tico sisters seemed to revel in it, wasting no time in hailing a stocky, cheerful-looking woman hoisting a cloth-lined basket of boiled duck eggs on one shoulder. Meanwhile, Finn kept watchful eyes glued to their luggage, meticulously patting his pockets every time he was jostled by the swell of the crowd—he was the kind of traveler whose first instinct after booking the flight was to save the address of the local consulate and all the emergency hotlines to his phone.

For his part, Ben amused himself by watching Paige and Rose burst into shrieks of laughter at the appalled expression on Poe's face when he peeled open the top of his duck egg to find the gray, half-formed embryo curled inside, soaked in a pool of broth and yolk. _ "Eat it, eat it, eat it," _they chanted, whipping out their phones to record the ordeal, and Poe looked at Rey as if for help.

But Rey was already going to town on her duck egg. Following the vendor's instructions, she cracked a small hole in the shell and sprinkled the proffered packet of salt into it, then she slurped up the broth before peeling the rest of the shell, nibbling at the creamy yolk and egg white as she went along. She saved the embryo for last, pausing only to flash a devilish grin at her friends before the hapless dead duckling disappeared into her mouth. Ben's stomach turned but he found himself unable to look away until Rey had swallowed the whole mess down, smacking her lips together with relish. 

"What d'you think, Rey?" Paige asked, her phone in the other woman's face.

"It's pretty good," Rey gamely replied, mugging for the camera. "I wouldn't mind another."

The Tico sisters cheered and, not to be outdone, Poe valiantly copied Rey's motions, although he never quite managed to stop grimacing right up to the bitter end. If Ben's memory served, the embryo's texture would be off-putting—rubbery with a hint of crunch, all slime and cartilage—and he almost felt sorry for Poe, who _ definitely _looked a little green around the edges once he'd gotten it all down.

Paige tipped him a mock salute. "Not bad, Dameron. We eat this in Hays Minor, too, you know. At least now there's a chance you won't embarrass me in front of my relatives."

"We'll see who embarrasses who when I make you eat roasted ants in Fest, Tico," Poe retorted. "Salty and buttery, like popcorn, although sometimes the legs get stuck in your teeth..."

"I have a question," Rose chimed in through a mouthful of duck egg. "After the wedding, are you guys _ still _going to call each other Dameron and Tico, respectively?"

Poe and Paige blinked at her, confused.

"Yes, of course," Poe said.

"Why would I call him anything else?" his fiancée scoffed.

"We're not corny like you two—" Poe gestured from Rose to Finn—"with your _ first-name basis _and shit—"

"Hey," Finn protested, "at least Rose and I don't go around using pet names—"

Four pairs of eyes swiveled accusingly to Ben and Rey. There was a brief moment of panic—a fleeting flicker of indecision—that ran through them both, all that Ben felt reflected in Rey's posture like they were connected by some strange feedback loop of awkwardness and regret.

Before he could figure out what to do, however, a black Tantive pulled up several feet in front of them—too close to the crowd for comfort, actually. Back in Coruscant, pedestrians would have griped, but the Alderaanians gave every indication of hardly noticing as they went about their business, a few of them merely stepping aside to make room for the large pickup truck.

The driver hopped out and made his way over to Ben, who gave a start. Scrawny and balding, with a perennially pinched expression on his face, Threepio had been the Organa family's chauffeur, nanny, gardener, and all-around handyman forever, and the last time Ben had seen him had been fifteen years ago, when Bail and Breha were living at the Presidential Palace in Aldera City. Threepio had been all skin and bones, with sunken eyes and a chronic, rattling cough, but _ now— _ it was as if he'd aged in reverse since then, his nut-brown skin giving off a healthy glow and his steps spry. He did not, in fact, look a day older than the _ first _time Ben had visited Leia's home country at nine years of age. Breha had been mayor of Chianar then.

"You're so tall!" Threepio exclaimed, clapping Ben on the shoulder. "Got that from your father's side, I'm sure."

"Good to see you, Threepio," Ben replied, smiling faintly despite himself because he really did mean it. He introduced the others and then Threepio helped them load their bags into the truckbed.

The seating arrangements were quickly decided upon; Poe and Paige jumped at the chance to ride out back with the luggage and film scenery for their travel vlog—_ "Two thousand subscribers," _ Poe liked to boast to anyone who would listen, _ "and more coming in each day"— _leaving Ben to sit up front beside Threepio while Finn, Rose, and Rey piled into the backseat. The doors slammed shut on the smell of saltwater and the Tantive roared out the port gates, leaving the sea behind for more urban trappings.

Chianar was unimpressive as far as cities went, boasting none of the towering skyscrapers found in Aldera or the centuries-old architecture of King's Pass further north. It had the look and feel of a small town, with its modest storefronts, neat houses, and people walking unhurriedly down quiet streets. Not much had changed since Ben's last visit, although Threepio proudly pointed out the shopping mall that hadn't been there twenty-five years ago.

_ "It's good that you're going back," _ Leia had said when she dropped by Ben's apartment in Coruscant to stuff gifts for Threepio, Bail, and Breha into his luggage. _ "Learn your roots. See where I grew up." _

_ "I've already done that," _ Ben had pointed out. _ "We spent two months there when I was nine, remember?" _

_"You were nine," _Leia had said dismissively. _"It will be different through a man's eyes." _She'd changed the subject then. _"You know, your grandparents will be _so _happy to meet Rey—"_

Ben hadn't had the heart to confess the truth, to tell Leia about the boxes upstairs already half-filled with Rey's things, waiting to be moved out when they got back from Alderaan. Instead, he'd just accepted his mother's soft smile and let her ramble because, as far as Leia Organa was concerned, her son's relationship with Rey Niima was the one thing he'd done right in his life, the one thing that she could be proud of.

*

Eventually the rows of buildings petered out, giving way to the endless sprawl of sugarcane fields that Ben remembered so well. Sunlight glinted off the tall green stalks, winking at the Tantive as it raced past. Last time, Threepio had driven him and his family all over this province, visiting the sights from one city to the next, and there had been areas of freeway where all they could see for hours was sugarcane. It was Logarra Island's primary crop, the finest of which—the ones that produced the best, sweetest sugar—was grown in Chianar. Vast, lush green plantations filled Ben's eyes, framed against the ever-present, dark blue, and many-pronged silhouette of the Juranno mountain range in the distance.

It was smooth cruising until they turned left. Almost instantly, the Tantive rattled over a foot of rough, worn-down concrete and then gave a worrying lurch when they hit a pothole. Threepio cursed under his breath.

"The roads were so much more well-maintained back when Breha was governor," he complained to Ben.

"I thought your grandma was the former president, Solo," Finn piped up from the backseat.

"She started out as mayor of Chianar and then provincial governor of Logarra," Ben explained. "Served a couple of terms in the senate before running for president." Rey already knew all of that, of course, but it wasn't surprising that Finn didn't. Finn, Rose, Poe, and Paige—they were really more Rey's friends than Ben's. He'd grown to like them well enough, but even _ that _ was steeped in grudging resentment because she'd never sure as fuck made the slightest effort to get along with _ his _friends.

Ben could still hear the censure in Rey's tone when he brought it up five months ago, after they'd gotten home from a First Order dinner. _"Hux, Phasma, and the rest—they're not your friends," _she'd scoffed as she took off her earrings in front of the vanity mirror. _"They're your coworkers, and you _loathe _them."_

_ "I do not. We just have disagreements from time to time, as is common in our field," _ Ben had insisted, shrugging out of his suit jacket. _ "Besides, Snoke wants me to build a more amicable relationship with my fellow partners." _

He'd watched her reflection roll its eyes at him. _ "And of course you must always do what Snoke wants." _

_ "If I can put up with Dameron's shit-eating, _ you _ can stop picking a fight with Hux every time you're in the same goddamn room," _Ben had snapped, and what had already been a bad night only got worse from there. Had that been the beginning of the end, or merely another blow to foundations that cracked long ago?

"I hated living in the capital," Threepio declared. "I swore to Bail's parents that I'd never leave his side, so, when Breha won the presidential race and they had to move to the Palace across the sea, I went with them. But Aldera City was too crowded, too noisy, too polluted. Too much of everything."

"You looked like you were ill when Mom and I stayed at the Palace," Ben recalled. "Fifteen years ago."

"And before that, when you were nine and stayed at the old house for a spell, your grandparents took you to see the tarsiers," Threepio supplied. "Remember?"

"Right," Ben said. "The little monkeys. No bigger than my hand."

"Oh, I love those guys!" Rose gushed. _ "Carlito syrichta. _I did a paper on them back in undergrad—they're endemic to Isatabith Island here in Alderaan. No zoo in the world has been able to keep them successfully."

"That's because they kill themselves if you take them out of Isatabith," Threepio said—much too cheerfully, in Ben's opinion, given the current topic. "Doesn't matter how comfortable their crates are, doesn't matter how carefully you transport them—once they leave the island it's like some inner switch goes off and they start banging their heads against the nearest surface until their tiny skulls split open."

"That's horrible," Rey said quietly. The first words she'd spoken since they left the port.

"I'm a bit like a tarsier, I think," Threepio concluded. "You remove me from my home—from Chianar—and I wither away. You put me back and I'm right as rain."

"How old _ are _you, Threepio?" Ben finally asked what he'd always wondered since he was a child.

"As old as my tongue," Threepio primly replied, "and a little older than my teeth."

*

Hidden behind tall brick walls overgrown with riotous sprays of bright pink bougainvillea, the Organa mansion rose up at the end of a long, wide, cement driveway. It was smaller than Ben remembered but still just as regal, with its stone-block facade and red-tiled roof, its window panels latticed with bits of capiz shell and its graceful white balustrades. The house was set amidst a grove of trees, mostly dense, broad-crowned star apple and willowy ylang-ylang, but there was one tree in particular that gave Ben pause as the Tantive drew nearer. It was a strangler fig—what the Alderaanians called _ balete— _ and it was a massive, ancient thing, thick and gnarled and draped in a tangled profusion of aerial roots so that the overall visual effect resembled some hairy gray ogre hunched over a meal of human flesh, its branches crowded right up against the third and topmost level, as if the house had been carefully built _ around _it.

The sight of that tree unlocked a host of childhood memories, ones that had until now lain mostly dormant save for dark and quiet nights, or late afternoons when the shadows were long in the apartment in Coruscant.

He shivered.

Finn had noticed the balete as well. "A storm hazard, if I ever saw one," he remarked. "If it gets hit by lightning, or if the wind blows the wrong way—some of those branches should be pruned, at least."

Threepio's tone was enigmatic yet stern. "The balete is not to be harmed under any circumstances."

"How come?" Rose asked.

Threepio didn't respond until they'd pulled up in front of the house. "That tree was already there when Charle Organa built this house two hundred years ago." The smooth roar of the Tantive's engine faded into silence and he removed the key from the ignition. "Things that old shouldn't be meddled with."

Ben emerged from the SUV just as the front door of the house swung open and two figures swept out onto the porch with about the same amount of imperiousness as a pair of dignitaries entering a ballroom. He approached them slowly, nervous all of a sudden. It had been fifteen years; would they be proud of the man he had become? Would they gaze upon him and recognize him as their own?

_ "Ben." _Breha Organa's smile outshone the hot tropical sun. She extended her right hand automatically, probably not even realizing she was doing it.

Bail chuckled. "Dear, the boy grew up in Coruscant. I don't think he knows—"

Ben _ did _ know. He'd been taught to do it the first time he visited, then reminded the second time, then Leia had sent him off at the airport a week ago with a half-serious threat to disown him if he forgot. He took Breha's hand and, bowing down slightly, pressed the back of it to his forehead in the traditional gesture of respect that was known as _ mano _on these islands.

After doing the same to Bail, Ben straightened up. His grandparents were beaming at him. Like the house, they, too, were smaller than he remembered, silver-haired and wrinkled with age, and his chest tightened—he should have come back sooner, he shouldn't have left it so long—

Bail wrapped his arms around his grandson in an exuberant bear hug. The man was pushing eighty but he somehow still managed to almost lift Ben off his feet. "Look at you, all grown up!" He drew back, scrutinizing Ben from head to toe with proud, dark eyes. "And _ so _tall!"

"Too skinny," Breha complained, pulling Ben in for a hug of her own. "Don't you eat rice? You should eat more rice."

"He's fine, dear." Bail poked Ben's arm. "Look at this, that's pure muscle. I remember when I was this fit! He's handsome, too, like me—"

"What are you talking about?" Breha scoffed, fondly ruffling Ben's hair. "He looks like his father."

"I don't know who that is," Bail loftily replied.

Even though more than a decade had passed, Ben was rarely ever able to find humor in his parents' divorce. But he cracked a smirk now at Bail's lingering indignation, a smirk that widened into a reluctant yet genuine grin when Bail went on to insist, "No, no, Breha, our grandson is the spitting image of me—"

"Whatever you say, _cariño,"_ Breha drawled, shooting a sly wink in Ben's direction. Leia had been adopted—the fact that neither grandparent brought this up and how it could possibly be an impediment to Ben resembling Bail struck him just then as the highest form of belonging, and he found himself unbelievably glad that he'd come all this way.

The feeling was quick to fade, however, when it was time to make the introductions. Ben saved Rey for last, delaying the inevitable for as long as he could, but no amount of steeling for it could have made it any less worse when he placed a hand on the small of Rey's back and felt her tense against his fingertips, like she wanted to shake him off.

"And this is Rey," he told Bail and Breha. "My girlfriend." He forced the words out, almost through gritted teeth, but his grandparents showed no sign of noticing—they were staring at Rey like she'd invented the wheel.

"It's nice to meet you," Rey said, painfully nervous and polite. She'd been so worried about making a favorable first impression; back when things were still good between them, Ben had always done his best to kiss her fears away, to assure her that his grandparents were going to love her at first sight, like his parents had.

He proved to be correct on that account, even though they were now broken up and this was nothing more than a charade. Breha took both of Rey's hands in hers, misty-eyed in a way that made Ben, quite frankly, regret everything. "_ Hija, _you are even more beautiful than your picture. Bail, look at her, isn't she so beautiful?"

"She is," Bail solemnly agreed, waiting until his wife had kissed Rey's cheek before doing the same. "Welcome to Chianar, Rey. We're happy to have you."

"Thank you," Rey said softly, a smile playing at the corner of her mouth. "I'm happy to be here."

Ben sardonically mused to himself that she was quite the consummate little actress—she had to be, for him to not have the slightest idea that anything had been broken beyond fixing until it all blew up in his face.

"My great-grandchildren are going to be _ supermodels," _Breha gleefully exclaimed.

"Boom," Poe whispered as Finn, Rose, and Paige burst into uproarious laughter and Ben fervently wished for an earthquake to strike so the ground could swallow him whole. That wasn't too far-fetched, right? Alderaan was in the Ring of Fire. It would happen any second now.

Rey looked—_ stricken. _Like she'd been punched in the gut. She was quick to hide it and start laughing along with the rest, but something about that fleeting expression drove a nail through Ben's heart. He'd told her from the start that he didn't want kids—there was too much baggage there, a U-Haul's worth—and she'd agreed, she'd always agreed, every time it was brought up. That brief look that had flitted across her features just now, however—it made him wonder if, somewhere along the way, that had changed on her end in the same manner that a great many other things had while he wasn't looking.

Bail and Breha ushered their guests inside while Threepio and several helpers who had materialized from the back of the house took care of the luggage. "We've prepared three rooms upstairs," Breha announced in resigned tones. "I know these are modern times. But sound travels in this old house, so keep it down, all right, kids?"

_ "Gran." _Ben was utterly mortified, while his friends snickered and his secret ex made a face more suited to having been told that she'd sleep out in the backyard. But, again, she wasted no time in putting on the mask and joining the others in their mirth, although Ben seemed to be the only one who picked up on how hollow her laugh sounded.

The interior of the house hadn't changed all that much, either. Transoms above the windows and ornate _ ventanillas _let in copious amounts of fresh air and golden daylight, sunbeams bouncing off of the polished mahogany floors and the hand-painted, red-and-white patterned tiles that decorated each stair landing. The walls were adorned with framed family portraits and watercolors depicting various aspects of traditional Alderaanian village life, and there was also—from Ben's point of view, having grown up largely secular and with a mother who was a lapsed Catholic—a rather disturbing amount of religious iconography. Christ on his cross grimaced down at the inhabitants of the house, mounted on the eastern wall of the living room to reign over wooden altars enshrining figurines of saints carved from ivory and biblical dioramas in bell-shaped glass jars. The entrance to the dining area was guarded by statues of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Child, both serene in countenance and draped in resplendent silks.

"This is giving me war flashbacks," Poe mumbled to Paige, and Ben distantly recalled that Poe had been raised Catholic, too, the religion having been brought to Fest by the same colonial empire that had once occupied Alderaan.

Against the backdrop provided by a ridiculously over-sized tapestry of The Last Supper, they sat down at a table laden with grilled pork belly, chicken and green papaya soup, and the ubiquitous big bowls of rice. Lunch was leisurely and pleasant; Bail and Poe hit it off right away, as their ancestors had originally migrated from the same continent and their families still had properties there—although Poe visited only once a year and Bail had not been back since he was a young man—and Breha was a gracious hostess, urging everyone to go in for second and third helpings and making sure no one was left out from the conversation.

The only hiccup occurred when Breha admired the Tico sisters' engagement rings and Paige mentioned that they were thinking of a double wedding next autumn. Breha's spoon clattered against the side of her soup bowl. "My dears, you can't!" she protested. "Siblings shouldn't marry within a year of each other. That's bad luck."

"Not everyone believes in _ sukob, _Gran—least of all people who aren't from here," Ben muttered, trying not to cringe. "But congratulations on managing to freak out my friends within an hour of meeting them."

Breha ignored him. "I know someone—a girl I went to school with—whose husband fell down the stairs a week after they got married. He was paralyzed for life, and then half a year later their business folded and they went into debt. My classmate consulted an _ arbularyo, _ who told her that her marriage was under _ sukob, _and she did some digging—turns out that her late father had had an illegitimate child with his former mistress, and that child—my classmate's half-sister—had also gotten married not long after she did."

"Lilit's husband was a drunkard," Bail dryly pointed out. "That's why he fell down the stairs. They dipped into company funds to pay for his medical bills and his gambling, and so naturally they went bankrupt. There's no wedding curse more potent than marrying a bad man, I tell you."

*

Once everyone had eaten their fill, they headed upstairs to partake in that most glorious of Alderaanian traditions, the _ siesta _or the afternoon nap. In contrast to the ground floor of the mansion, the third level was gloomier since most of its windows were behind closed bedroom doors. The portraits of long-dead Organas that lined the walls gave the eerie illusion of looking at Ben with their sightless dark eyes; he remembered walking down this very hallway as a child, his footsteps thudding on the soft carpet, unable to shake the sensation that the people in the frames were tracking his every move.

_ "Even if there were ghosts in this house, you shouldn't be scared of them," _ Threepio had told him once. _ "They're your family. They watch over you." _

_ "Mom's adopted," _Ben had replied.

Their little group dwindled as people reached their respective quarters and disappeared inside. Soon it was only Ben and Rey approaching the end of the narrow corridor and, yes, here it was, the small table with the Bible and the rosary in a glass, the spot where his bravado had always petered out as an entire hallway's worth of portraits stared at the back of his neck and he'd _ run, _the feeling of being watched and of being followed too much to bear.

God, in all the years that had passed, amidst all the planning that had gone into this vacation, how could it have slipped his mind that this old house had given him the fucking _ creeps? _

"Earth to Ben." Rey was frowning up at him. Her stony features were almost unrecognizable in the half-light. "Which one's ours?"

Still engulfed in the brief yet terrible sojourn along memory lane, Ben could do nothing but mutely jerk his head towards the second-to-the-last door on the right. Breha had told him that he and Rey had been assigned the same room he'd stayed in twenty-five years ago, the room that had been Leia's when she was a girl.

Rey's hand hovered over the doorknob, her hazel eyes searching his face. "Are you all right?" she finally asked.

"Do you care?" he snapped. They were alone; no need for acting.

Her frown deepened. "You're right. I don't."

They went inside the room, both of them fuming, both of them sick of it, although part of him was more than glad to close the door on the hallway of childhood ghosts. And then—

—And then—

There was only one bed.

Of _ course. _

This shouldn't have come as a surprise; Ben had slept in this room for two months as a child and he knew every inch of it, including the fact that there was only one bed. But knowing something was so different from actually seeing it—seeing it again—this concrete, undeniable proof that he would have to share such close quarters with Rey for three whole weeks.

He watched out of the corner of his eye as she took stock of the room—the walls painted a pale sage green, the towering wardrobe with a crown of fretted scrollwork atop its three mirrored doors, the Solomonic columns that divided each set of lace-curtained windows into neat halves, the lampshades woven from rattan vine, the sewing table and the dresser and the chairs wrought from the same glossy, reddish wood. It was the bed that took center stage, a narra four-poster hung with translucent white drapes, its framework a lyrical stream of stylized flowers and squash-shaped domes, the headboard an ogee-arched single panel intricately carved with renditions of acanthus and honeysuckle.

Rey's gaze fell on the bed with reluctance, like she'd already noticed it—perhaps even from the moment she walked in—but had wanted to put off acknowledging it for as long as possible. She was good at lying to herself like that.

Ben almost offered to sleep on the floor, which would have been the gentlemanly thing to do, but Solo stubbornness dug in its heels at the last second. _ He _ wasn't the one who had given up, _ he _ hadn't suddenly fallen silent in the middle of another fight and then said in barely a whisper, gaze lost in the distance, _ "I can't do this anymore." _

He wasn't the one who'd started putting things into boxes the very next day.

And he _damn well_ wasn't going to be the one who slept on the floor of _his_ old room.

Ben stalked over to the left side of the bed and sat down with a determined air, studiously avoiding Rey's eyes as he bent to unlace his sneakers. After a while, the mattress shifted as she mirrored his actions on the right, but it wasn't long before she went still.

He glanced over; she was staring at the window a few feet away from her side of the bed, the window that the balete branches were pressed up against. A mesh screen had been installed to keep the insects out; beyond it, nestled like a valley of dense bramble between the open latticework panels, the depths of the balete lurked dark green and vast, blocking out the sky.

"What's up with that tree, anyway?" Begrudging curiosity seeped into Rey's previously hostile tone. "Why doesn't your family want to cut it down?"

"Superstition, mostly," said Ben. "It's an ancient Alderaanian belief that spirits live in the balete trees."

He was vaguely embarrassed to say such a thing out loud, so soon after his grandmother had warned their friends that their marriages would be cursed because of the joint wedding date, but Rey didn't seem to mind. "What kind of spirits?" she prodded.

Another memory tugged at Ben's subconscious. A memory of being nine years old and huddled beneath the blankets late at night, the thick, noxious odor of cigar smoke wafting in from the tree outside. He'd seen—or _ thought _ he'd seen—a pair of eyes once, peering at him through the window, red and inhuman. But he hadn't told anyone, had he, he'd raised up _ such _a stink about wanting his very own room in this big old house—

"I'm not certain," Ben told Rey. "In any case, none of it is real. Obviously."

"Obviously," she echoed. "It's just a bit creepy, that's all."

But she didn't tear her gaze from the tree for several long moments, and the look in her eyes was more fascination than it was fear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Star Wars References:**
> 
> [Sanctuary Coast](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sanctuary_Coast)
> 
> [Chianar](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Chianar)
> 
> [AA-9 Coruscant freighter](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/AA-9_Coruscant_freighter)
> 
> [The Tantive IV](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Tantive_IV/Legends)
> 
> [Hays Minor](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Hays_Minor)
> 
> [Fest](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Fest/Legends)
> 
> [Aldera City](http://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Aldera)
> 
> [Logarra District](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Logarra_District)
> 
> [Istabith](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Isatabith_rain_forest)
> 
> **Philippine References:**
> 
> [Balut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balut_%28food%29) (hot tip for tourists: don't let the locals clown you into trying it if you _really_ don't want to, I've lived here all my life and I've never let balut touch my lips 😂)
> 
> [The tarsier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_tarsier)
> 
> A typical highway in [the Visayas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visayas) (where I grew up) will have at least one [Ceres bus](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Ceres_Liner_No5446.jpg), [a tricycle just waiting to tip over](https://kaisermelt.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/img_18551.jpg), and during the harvest season a [bigass truck](https://www.expatinbacolod.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sugar-cane-truck.jpg) that you never want to find yourself driving behind. Overtake as soon as possible unless you're a fan of loose sugarcane stalks pelting your windshield.
> 
> Most of our Spanish-era houses have "capiz windows" made from the shells of the [windowpane oyster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windowpane_oyster). A pretty good example of what the interior of an old house looks like can be found in [this article](https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/122223/taals-19th-century-house-history-made-interesting/). The creepy hallway is lifted directly from what was on the second floor of my grandparents' house that I always noped out of as fast as my feet could take me when I was younger, as is the bedroom that Ben and Rey are staying in. The bed looks exactly like the ones [here](https://bedsbaulesandbeyond.wordpress.com/2017/09/07/the-furniture-of-ah-tay-part-2-the-masters-pieces/).
> 
> [Mano](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mano_%28gesture%29)
> 
> [Sukob](http://weddingsinthephilippines.com/superstitions/)
> 
> [Balete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balete_tree) (we had one of these at my old grade school and I vividly remember the campus-wide panic that ensued when someone claimed they saw a ghost in the branches during recess; for some reason we all _flocked towards the tree_ instead of running away from it)
> 
> What they ate for lunch: [liempo](https://panlasangpinoy.com/filipino-food-grilled-pork-belly-inihaw-na-liempo-baboy-recipe/) and [tinola](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinola)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the long wait, as I was traveling in Europe, but I'm back now and I was ever so happy to see all the lovely comments on the first chapter! Thank you! Here's the second installment <3

After their jam-packed, adventurous week on Sanctuary Coast, the group was too tired that first day in Chianar to do anything more than sleep, wake up for dinner, then sleep again. At the crack of dawn the next morning, Ben and Rey were unceremoniously jolted out of slumber by what couldn't be described as anything else but an ungodly racket.

  


"What _ is _that?" Rey groaned, lifting her head from the pillow as peal upon peal of shrill crowing split the cool air, gradually increasing in volume until the world rang with a jarring chorus that was not unlike a nail being hammered into the skull.

  


"Roosters," Ben sighed drowsily, giving her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. "They do that every morning here. Better get used to it."

  


"Hmm." Rey's fingers automatically clutched at his wrist, her thumb stroking the back of his hand, and there was something not quite right about this moment, the coziness of it, the warmth—

  


The two of them froze at the same time. His eyes flew wide open as the layers of sleep dissipated and his brain registered that he was lying on his stomach, one arm carelessly slung across Rey's slim figure curled up on its side, facing away from him. Her grip tightened around his wrist, a prelude to wrenching his arm off of her, but—but she _ didn't, _her hand stilled, burning her fingerprints into his skin, breath hitching in her throat—

  


A new round of crowing blared in from the open windows, louder and more energetic than the last. It was enough to jolt Ben to his senses and he immediately rolled over, putting as much distance between him and Rey as was possible within the confines of the mattress, which was _ not _as big as he remembered.

  


Maybe he really _should_ sleep on the floor.

  


Without saying another word, Rey clambered out of bed. Ben heard her root around in her luggage for toiletries and a fresh change of clothes before disappearing into the en suite. Soon the shower started running and he, too, stood up, eager to distract himself from imagining his ex-girlfriend naked and wet and something _ else _standing up.

  


The window by his side of the bed showed a lightening sky, tinged pink and gold with the first traces of a burgeoning sunrise. The other window was still cast in darkness, dawn's light too faint to surmount the tree. Ben walked over to it without really knowing why, although a voice in the back of his head whispered about moths and open flames. Through the screen, he could just barely distinguish the shadowy outlines of oval leaves and branches dripping with hairlike roots.

  


_ "What kind of spirits?" _Rey had asked yesterday, and the longer Ben searched his memory the more it came back to him in bits and pieces—not who or what was said to dwell in the balete, specifically, but all the old stories that he'd overheard his grandparents' maids exchanging, the stories he'd occasionally managed to wheedle out of his mother when he wanted to be spooked. The stories about the monsters that so many people believed roamed this land.

  


_"—Was on my way home last night when I heard a baby crying somewhere in the bushes, I'm going back there today to light a candle—"_

  


_ "—My cousin swears he once saw a _ tikbalang _ in a bamboo grove, he's sure it was too tall to be human and, besides, it had a horse's head and hooves—" _

  


_"—When they opened the girl's coffin, her body was gone! Replaced by a banana trunk—"_

  


_ "—Now _ this _ one, Ben, will detach her upper torso and fly off into the night on bat-like wings—You must find the severed lower torso and sprinkle salt onto it, so she'll be unable to rejoin her two halves and perish at sunrise—" _

  


It was all ludicrous, of course. Just old wives' tales. There was a reason Ben hadn't spared them a thought since outgrowing bedtime stories and Ouija boards. But now that he was back in Alderaan, there was a certain sense of... _ possibility. _Like the tingling promise of rain or the smell of ripening fruit.

  


_ No, not Alderaan, _ he corrected himself. He hadn't felt this in Aldera City fifteen years ago or on Sanctuary Coast last week. _ It's just here in Chianar. _He was in Chianar, which seemed worlds removed from the bustling capital and the sunny resort island despite being in the same country. He was in Chianar, where the portraits watched him and folklore was rooted deep into the earth itself.

  


Chianar, where anything could be real.

  


By the time Rey exited the bathroom, Ben had slid the window-panels shut over the screen, hiding the balete tree from view.

  


*

  


Bail and Breha were already seated at the dining table when their guests trooped downstairs for breakfast, lured by the mouthwatering aromas of freshly-baked _ pandesal _and eggplant omelets and strips of spice-cured beef sirloin hot off the fryer. Finn, Rose, Poe, Paige, and Rey emitted glad cries at the sight of the food and quickly dug in, but Ben hesitated, his chair situated close enough to his grandparents that he could notice that Breha looked agitated and Bail grave.

  


"It's really such a horrible way to go," Breha told Bail fretfully. "He didn't deserve that."

  


"Who didn't deserve what?" Ben asked.

  


His grandmother pursed her lips, and his grandfather was the one who took it upon himself to explain. "A very good friend of ours—Agrippa Aldrete, you might remember him, Ben—was found dead in the woods of his estate this morning, after failing to return from his customary evening walk the night before. The body was—" Bail hesitated, as if in deference to the fact that his audience was in the middle of a meal—"not in good condition. He'd been... attacked."

  


"Attacked?" Paige repeated sharply. "By who?"

  


Bail and Breha exchanged glances, and Ben was reminded of the way Han and Leia would briefly look at each other when he asked a question they didn't want him to know the answer to. It was the universal _ "Well, _ I'm _ not going to tell them" _look that parents all around the world had elevated to an art form.

  


"It's more of a _ what _ rather than a _ who," _Bail said at last. "Judging from the wounds, it was some type of animal."

  


"He could have gone into cardiac arrest or had a stroke," Breha suggested, "and was discovered by a stray dog or a wild pig."

  


"That's nice," Finn grumbled, blinking down at the glistening innards of his half-eaten eggplant omelet.

  


"In any case," Breha continued, making the Sign of the Cross, "it was still a bad death for such a good man. I am sorry for his family." She turned to Ben. "_ Hijo, _it's unfortunate that this should happen during your visit, but will you accompany your grandfather and myself to the wake sometime this week? The Aldretes were so excited to see you before all this."

  


Ben nodded, knowing that he didn't really have a choice in the matter. In Alderaan, whenever somebody died, everyone who had even the slightest connection to the deceased or the bereaved was expected to drop by and pay their respects. And he _ did _remember Agrippa Aldrete—a tall, bearded gentleman who'd been a constant fixture in Bail and Breha's living room, who'd always had a supply of White Rabbit candy for Ben in his shirt pocket.

  


"Rey, you _ must _ come, too," Breha declared, and Rey's spoon stilled halfway to her mouth. "Celana Aldrete will _ never _forgive me if I don't bring my grandson's girlfriend to her husband's wake."

  


*

  


After breakfast—and lots of promises to his grandparents that they would be careful, that they had food and water in their packs, that they were wearing sunblock—Ben led his group out the back gate and onto the wide dirt road that connected the house to the rest of the estate. The Organas grew sugarcane, rice, and mangoes. They also supplied milk and eggs to most of the bakeries in Chianar and, on the river that flowed along the edges of the property, there was a thriving freshwater prawn farm as well. One could hike for an entire day in any direction and still fail to reach the neighbors by nightfall—it was land that provided many opportunities for exploring that Rey and the others were all too happy to seize.

  


Had the circumstances been any different, Ben would have rather enjoyed taking them around like this, showing Rey this side of his mother's illustrious family. He wouldn't have minded the blazing sun, the muggy heat, and the intermittent clouds of bugs as much. But, as it was, he was sweaty, covered in insect bites, and supremely frustrated by his and Rey's balancing act of avoiding having to speak to each other unless absolutely necessary while at the same time trying to make sure everyone else didn't catch on. Thank _ God _Poe and Paige were busy filming for their vlog and Finn was plenty distracted by Rose nerding out over each species of bird and butterfly that they came across.

  


They didn't stick to the path. After a couple of hours of meandering, they reached an assortment of stilt cottages scattered beneath the shade provided by a row of coconut trees. As if on cue—or, more accurately, as if she'd been told to keep an eye out for the Organa scion and his friends blundering about in the middle of the work day—a woman rushed out of one cottage to greet them.

  


_ "Ben!" _she squealed, standing on tiptoe to pepper a loud, smacking kiss to each of Ben's cheeks. "You're so tall! So handsome! Last time I saw you, you'd taken all your clothes off so you could swim in the creek with the carabaos!"

  


The Tico sisters smirked as their respective fiancés howled in glee. Even Rey couldn't seem to suppress a grin at the mental image, and the tips of Ben's ears flushed hotly in a way that had nothing to do with the tropical sun.

  


"Hello, Elsie," he grunted. She was one of Bail and Breha's tenants who sometimes pitched in at the big house when it was short-staffed. Her husband farmed the land and the Organas had sent all five of her children to college—one of the sons had even made his way to Coruscant, and would visit Leia from time to time.

  


Ben made the introductions and was immediately forgotten once Elsie found out that Rey was his girlfriend. Her eyes shining, she took Rey's arm and all but tugged her towards the cottage while Ben and the others trailed behind, a small army of chickens pecking around their feet.

  


It was Poe who noticed it first, lightly elbowing Ben in the ribs. "Solo, are those _ stakes?" _

  


The cottage was, in the traditional Alderaanian style, raised a few feet off the earth by wooden supports. Between these stilts, Ben could see a multitude of bamboo stalks that had been driven through the floor, each one whittled to end in a sharp point aimed at the ground. It was as if they'd been placed there to deter something from crawling under the house. A few of the nearby cottages were similarly rigged.

  


"Maybe they have a rat problem," Ben ventured.

  


Poe winced. "Poor rats."

  


Elsie kept up a vibrant stream of mostly one-sided chatter as she sat her guests at a plastic table in the small yet homey kitchen area inside the cottage. "Threepio texted me earlier that you kids might be coming this way, so I thought I'd prepare some nice snacks—How's the electric fan? Strong enough? You can turn it up to 3 if you want—My husband ate all the steamed rice cakes before he went out to the fields, idiot man, but I have sticky rice and mangoes, eat all you want, there's a surplus because of the _ El Niño— _ Who wants Coke? Sprite? _ Nako, _if my husband were here I'd make him cut down some fresh coconuts for you—How's your mother, Ben? You tell that no-good dad of yours..."

  


Despite the aforementioned lack of rice cakes, it was a delicious meal, the mangoes unbelievably juicy and sweet and the ice-cold soda a welcome respite. "I do hope you enjoy the rest of your vacation here," Elsie said as she dumped another serving of glutinous rice cooked in coconut milk onto a happily unprotesting Finn's plate. "Chianar is beautiful. Just maybe be careful after dark—look what happened to Agrippa Aldrete."

  


"What _ did _happen, anyway?" Ben asked. "My grandparents weren't exactly forthcoming with the details."

  


Elsie leaned forward with all the eagerness of a true gossip. "My niece's brother-in-law works on the Aldrete farm. Old man Agrippa went out for a walk after dinner and never came back. They looked for him all night and, finally, one of the search parties stumbled across his body in the woods, about twenty kilometers from the house. He was ninety-two, he couldn't have walked that far, but there were no marks in the ground to suggest that he'd been dragged to that spot, either."

  


Paige blinked. "So—something snatched him up and flew off?"

  


"Who knows?" said Elsie in the mysterious tone of one who knew all too well. "When they found Agrippa, his body had been ripped apart as if by sharp fangs and completely drained of blood, and his internal organs were missing. The mortician's going to have his work cut out for him, I tell you."

  


"An animal that has wings and fangs, drinks blood and eats viscera, and is presumably large enough to carry an adult male over a considerable distance," Rose mused. "I don't believe I've ever heard of anything like that. Besides, the only apex predators native to Alderaan are the great eagle, the reticulated python, and a handful of shark, crocodile, and monitor lizard species. None of them would be capable of killing Mr. Aldrete in that manner."

  


"Least of all the sharks," Ben drawled.

  


"But that's the thing," Elsie said conspiratorially. "No one _ actually _believes it was a wild animal that did it. That's what the authorities are saying, that's what we tell ourselves, but deep down—deep down everyone who lives here knows what killed the old man."

  


"What was it, then?" Rey asked.

  


Elsie lowered her voice. "An _ aswang." _

  


Ben was not at all surprised that people would jump to this conclusion. "That's just a children's story, Elsie."

  


"Do I look like a child to you, Ben Solo?" Elsie huffed. Seeing the confused expressions on the faces of the rest of the group, she went on to explain, "An _aswang_ is a shapeshifter that eats human flesh. During the day they look like normal people, but at night they transform into winged monsters who break into houses and feast on the blood and internal organs of their victims... or they snatch up those who are walking alone near the woods, like poor Agrippa. They can also take on the form of a large pig or a black dog when they're scouting. The preferred diet includes pregnant women—fetuses are a delicacy—and some variants feed on corpses—"

  


"That's nice," Finn grumbled again, dolefully pushing slick, moist slices of yellow mango around with his fork.

  


"—But anyone will do in a pinch, if they're starving," Elsie concluded. "There hasn't been a reported _ aswang _ attack in Chianar in years, but we _ have _seen an uptick in missing persons cases over the last few months. If you ask me, whoever this was got sloppy last night. They're always so careful to cover their tracks when they move to a new place, but after a while the beast inevitably wins out."

  


Ben expected the others to treat Elsie's little spiel with baffled amusement; looking around the table, however, he saw only quiet, solemn faces. It wasn't just him, then—something about Chianar turned people into believers, even just for a little while, even if it was just during these moments spent eating sticky rice and mangoes in a kitchen where the light that filtered in was subdued in the shade cast by towering palms and there were dozens of stakes beneath their feet. _ To keep something out, to keep them from crawling under the house— _

  


"Well, that's probably enough talk from me," Elsie said with a self-conscious little chuckle. "Don't want to scare you kids _ too _much. You're staying with Breha, after all, and she grew up in Belleau-a-Lir. She knows what to do. You'll be fine. Eat up, eat up."

  


*

  


The group was in a pensive mood when they left the cluster of tenants' cottages and broke past the coconut trees to tread along the margins of the rice fields. Distant figures waved at Ben from where they stood shin-deep in the paddies, wearing wide-brimmed straw hats. He waved back awkwardly, and soon Finn and Poe couldn't resist doing the same, marching along with exaggerated pomp.

  


Ben quickened his pace, both annoyed and embarrassed, and it was the shock of a lifetime when Rey hurried to catch up to him. She didn't say a word, though, electing to just walk silently by his side, and it was with no small amount of bitterness that he realized she was just keeping up appearances. Consoling her grumpy boyfriend while he sulked after being made fun of by her friends.

  


It was a familiar scene; the difference was that it was now nothing more than an illusion, and it gnawed at his heart.

  


But Rey _ did _deign to speak to him eventually, once the fifth or so group of farmers had lifted their hands in greeting. "They all know you," she said in what sounded like wonder.

  


"They all work for my grandparents, and my mother was an only child," Ben said gruffly. "She grew up here and everyone doted on her, by all accounts. So I guess it's a bit of that."

  


"Why did she leave? I mean—" Rey gestured at the sprawling fields to their left, the lush trees to their right, the green hectares that went on forever, the faraway mountains, the clear blue sky. "This is already all so..."

  


She trailed off, biting her lip. He could practically feel that age-old insecurity creeping up on her. After what passed for primary and secondary education in the badly-managed, ill-funded school districts of Jakku, Rey had gone to Coruscant University on an engineering scholarship; she worked with numbers, with diagrams, with her hands. She was conscious about not being well-spoken and, several nights of the week, Ben would catch her slogging her way through a chapter of a dusty old title from the classic lit canon, the dictionary app open on her phone.

  


_ It's okay, _ Ben wanted to tell her. _ I know what you mean. You're the smartest person I've ever met. _

  


But they were no longer in a position where he had any right to say things like that, and so instead he tried to answer her as best and as honestly as he could. "My mother wanted to make something of herself. She wanted to change the world, and she couldn't do it from here, where nothing ever changes. Had she stayed, she would always have been Bail and Breha's daughter."

  


"I don't think I'll ever be able to understand how that can be a bad thing," Rey said slowly. "Being someone's daughter. Belonging. But I do admire your mom for her work with the United Nations, which is why—" She broke off abruptly, the unspoken end of the sentence hanging between them, a heavy accusation, an unnavigable space. _ Which is why I don't understand why you work for someone like Snoke. _

  


Before Ben could figure out how to react, before they ended up fighting about the same thing they'd constantly fought about towards the end of their relationship, Rey quickly changed the subject, apparently not too keen to blow their cover with Finn, Rose, Poe, and Paige only a few feet away. "So what's in Belleau-a-Lir? Elsie mentioned that your grandmother grew up there. What did that have to do with this whole thing with Mr. Aldrete?"

  


Although he was relieved that the conversation had shifted to a more neutral topic, Ben still couldn't help but grimace. "Belleau-a-Lir is a city on the other side of Logarra Island, approximately six hours' drive from Chianar. It's... they call it _ aswang _country. The way most Alderaanians talk about that place, you'd think half its population sprouted wings and prowled the countryside eating babies every night."

  


"And you don't believe that?"

  


Ben stared at her. "Rey, none of it is true. People need a way to explain a string of disappearances capped off by a strange death, and so they turn to folklore. It might not be entirely plausible, but it's interesting and it passes the time. Elsie herself probably didn't even put much stock in what she was saying. It's what people do around here—they tell ghost stories."

  


"The _ aswang _isn't a ghost," Rey corrected with a wry half-smile. "It's a shapeshifter."

  


Ben quirked an eyebrow at her, the beginnings of a smirk tugging at his lips. "My mistake."

  


It was the first genuinely companionable moment they'd shared in weeks. He had the sinking feeling that, despite all his bluster and all his rage, he would hoard it like treasure after they went back to Coruscant, when the time came for him to let her go.

  


*

  


Finn crashed into the anthill at two in the afternoon.

  


The group had eaten their packed lunches beneath the mango trees and had then wandered further afield, onto untilled land that the Organas had chosen for whatever reason to let run wild with white-tufted cogongrass and the slender, low-hanging _ makahiya _whose leaves folded shut at the slightest touch. There was a creek burbling nearby, hidden from view by a gentle downwards slope.

  


Ben had never been to this area of the property before and he couldn't shake the uneasy thought that it should have stayed that way. The daylight fell differently here, somehow, each blade of grass and each pebble cast in sharper relief. Like this spot was more... _ real _than the rest of the land. Carved more intrinsically into the bones of the earth.

  


He glanced over his shoulder in the direction they'd come from. The sensation of wrongness was subtle enough that he hadn't noticed it right away, but now that he was really looking it appeared to start right where the flat buffalo grass planted for grazing met the riotous weeds. They were trespassing. He was sure of it, the spine-chilling certainty overwhelming him into a state of increasing panic.

  


Ben opened his mouth to direct the rest of the group to turn back, but they'd already set down their packs and Finn and Poe had found a grimy old soccer ball—most likely abandoned by some of the tenants' children—and were kicking it around. Eventually they roped the girls into an impromptu game and Ben had to stand there, rolling his eyes as five of Coruscant's best and brightest scuffled in the grass.

  


_ "GOOOOOOOOL!!!" _Poe hollered, running around in circles with fists raised after a particularly fine kick that sent the ball soaring towards the waterline.

  


"Over my dead body!" Finn shouted, giving chase.

  


It was Ben who saw it first as his gaze followed Finn's exuberant sprint—rising up out of the long grass, directly in the younger man's path, was a mound of rust-colored earth about two feet high. "Watch out—" Ben started to yell, but it was too late. His eyes fixed on the ball sailing above him, Finn collided with the mound and fell down with a startled yelp.

  


"Finn!" Rose hurried over to her fiancé, the rest of the group close behind. "Are you okay—_ shit!" _

  


It wasn't long before Ben started cursing, too, Poe and Paige and Rey joining in the chorus of horrified exclamations. But they were all drowned out by Finn's screams.

  


Ants—dozens, _ hundreds _of them—flowed out from the scattered clumps of soil where the mound had once stood, a fire-red tide of wriggling antennae and gnashing pincers swarming over Finn's sprawled legs. He slapped at them with his bare hands and tried to shake them off but, despite his best efforts, the lower half of his body was soon covered in the mass that crawled and writhed as a single unit with a thousand eyes and too many limbs, mindlessly flocking upwards to devour him whole—

  


Finn scrambled to his feet and, still screaming his head off, bolted straight for the creek.

  


And _ dove. _

  


Ben and the others ran after him, skidding to a halt on the elevated, muddy banks just in time to witness the top of his head disappearing into the brown water. Paige caught Rose around the waist to prevent her from jumping in as well, and then there was nothing but silence and stillness. Not even the slightest ripple disturbed the surface.

  


"Finn?" Rey called, leaning over the water as far as her center of gravity would allow, peering into its murky depths. _ "Finn?" _

  


Ben paled. There were no shallows that he could see; it appeared to be just a straight drop, the depth of which was impossible to judge at a glance. Things could get very bad—if they hadn't already.

  


Poe was kicking off his shoes. "It's all right," he told Rose, who was struggling to free herself from her sister's grip. "I'm going in, stay right here—"

  


Ben shrugged off his backpack, reaching out to gently guide Rey away from the edge of the bank before she also got it into her head to dive. "Poe and I will go in," he told her quietly. "Wait with Rose, help Paige calm her down—"

  


And that was when Finn's grinning face surged out of the water—which came only up to his neck—laughing uproariously with a devilish glint in his eyes.

  


The mood immediately changed. Poe and the Tico sisters pelted him with twigs and clumps of grass.

  


"Bro, come _ on—" _

  


"You _ suck!" _

  


"How _ dare _you, Finn Llewellyn Bates-Evans!"

  


Rey crossed her arms, glaring daggers at her best friend as he dodged each projectile, his athletic body twisting effortlessly amidst the slow currents. "That was _ not _funny," she snapped. "We thought you—"

  


And that was as far as she got before Finn swam up to the raised bank, wrapped his arms around her knees, and pulled her into the water with him, still laughing fit to burst as she screeched.

  


*

  


It was dusk by the time the Organas' ancestral house came into view on the wide dirt road. The group trudged forward eagerly, the promise of a shower, a fresh change of clothes, and a heavy meal beckoning like siren song. They were all caked in mud, and damp from a combination of creek water and a humid three-hour trek's worth of sweat.

  


Some of them were less happy about the current situation than others. Ben walked stiffly off to the side, hair plastered to his forehead and wet socks squelching in equally wet shoes, rebuffing all attempts at apology with a dark glower. He hadn't appreciated getting caught up in the splash of Poe cannonballing into the water, and he _ definitely _hadn't been fond of the moment Paige and Rose grabbed his arms as they ran past, hauling him along with them into the depths.

  


He heard the others whispering among themselves—because this particular group was about as subtle as a ton of damn bricks—and then Rey was nudged towards him. "Paige and Rose are _ very _ sorry," she announced, taking his arm for the audience's benefit, although the way she rolled her eyes in exasperation at their friends' antics felt like a private thing that was for him alone, something that he greedily snatched up against his better judgment and held to his injured dignity like a balm. "They promise to be on their best behavior from now on. Please don't make them sleep out in the woods with the _ aswang." _

  


Ben snorted. "Not even the _ aswang _deserves that kind of punishment."

  


Rey giggled like she'd forgotten that they were secretly broken up and, fool that Ben was, he nearly tripped over his own two feet. He couldn't remember the last time he'd made her laugh. The sweet sound of it nearly brought him to his knees.

  


*

  


The main course that night was _ callos, _a bright orange stew made from ox tripe and veal shanks. Rey polished off four helpings, each one with a cupful of rice, in addition to a garlicky vegetable dish that consisted of bitter melon, string beans, okra, tomatoes, and squash steamed in fermented shrimp paste. Breha watched her fondly and, when it was time for dessert, plied her with a second serving of cheese ice cream that she gladly accepted.

  


After the plates had been cleared and Poe mentioned that he could do with a nightcap, Bail nobly donated a bottle of his prized sugarcane rum to the worthwhile cause. Nine in the evening found them like this, then: Ben, Rey, Poe, and Paige sitting in the living room with square crystal glasses and the rum and a bucket full of ice, as well as a kettle full of hot chocolate that Breha had told the maid to prepare after Rey said she wasn't in the mood for hard liquor. Finn had gone up to bed right after dinner, claiming that he wasn't feeling well, and Rose had accompanied him.

  


"Is Finn okay, do you think?" Rey was sitting next to Ben on the couch, his arm draped over her shoulders because they were still doing the pretending thing, after all. She addressed this question to the room at large, but Poe and Paige were huddled over their video camera, snickering at the more hilarious moments that they'd captured during the hike.

  


"He looked a bit flushed," Ben replied. "Maybe the heat got to him. If he were allergic to ant bites, I'm pretty sure he should be experiencing a more adverse reaction at this time."

  


"He was probably just tired," Poe opined, clambering out of the armchair he was sharing with his fiancée to pour himself another glass of rum. "Or in the mood for love. Rose went up with him, did you notice?"

  


Paige shuddered. "Dameron, can we _ not? _That's my little sister you're talking about." She sipped her drink before placing the glass down on a side table as she surveyed the living room. Ben knew without having to ask that she was taking in the biblical dioramas and the crucifix and the outstretched hands of all those silent saints. Even her drink was sharing space on the side table with a miniature Anthony of Padua, holding an Infant Jesus that looked, at first glance, to be wagging an admonishing finger at Paige's rum.

  


"I feel like I should be on my knees begging for forgiveness," she muttered.

  


"Don't worry about it, Tico," Poe said, carefully slipping ice cubes into his glass and Ben's. "Alcoholism is the finest Catholic tradition there is."

  


"In that case, Rey's a heretic," Paige quipped, eyes twinkling at the mug of hot chocolate that Rey was holding. But her tone was one of good-natured humor rather than judgment; given the circumstances that had led to Rey landing in foster care when she was five years old, it was an unspoken rule that no one forced her to drink when she didn't feel like it.

  


Ben had to admit that the sugarcane rum hit _ hard. _ It was deceptively smooth with a hint of sweetness that lingered on the palate, masking how potent it actually was. After two glasses, he and Poe were locked in a heated debate about the ending of _ Inception, _with Rey serving as an unimpressed sort-of referee and Paige in her own world on the armchair, reviewing the day's footage.

  


"It wasn't a dream," Poe argued. "The top was going to stop spinning. Cobb only wore his wedding ring in his dreams and he definitely wasn't wearing it in the last scene, so that is _ irrefutable proof _he was awake—"

  


"And I'm telling you that it doesn't _ matter," _Ben retorted. "The whole point of that ending was that Cobb didn't care anymore, that he was happy regardless of whether it was a dream or not—"

  


"That movie was really pretentious," Rey commented. "_ Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus _was so much better—"

  


The discussion ended abruptly with a sharp gasp from Paige. They all turned to look at her; she was staring down at the video camera, mouth agape. Poe hurried over in concern and, at an apparent loss for words, she mutely showed him something on the playback screen.

  


His brow furrowed. "Hell, that can't be right."

  


"What is it?" Rey left her spot on the couch, followed by Ben, the two of them crowding around the armchair to study the video.

  


Paige hit the _ play _ button once more. At first it was a totally normal scene, Poe holding the camera and panning it to encompass the group as they trekked over the grassy sprawl between the rice fields and the mango orchard. "Here." She tapped _ pause _on a frame of Rey talking to Finn and Rose while, beside her, Ben looked off into the distance. It was strange to see them like that, frozen in motion with the sun blurring at the edges. Like they were only half-finished things.

  


Stranger by far, though, was what Ben saw when—

  


"Look at this," Paige murmured, zooming in on the trees in the background. They hadn't reached the mango orchard yet; these trees were known in the local parlance as _ katmon, _buttressed and silver-grained with coarsely-toothed leaves. And between two of the trees, peeking out from the tangle of branches, was a face—tufts of shaggy hair, a dark eye, a hooked nose, swathes of pale skin, all coming together to form the indistinct left-side profile of what appeared to be a man caught in freeze-frame amidst the highest leaves, as if he'd been walking behind the row of katmon at the exact moment of filming.

  


But for that to be possible—for his head to almost level with the treetops—he had to have been at least thirty feet tall.

  


Paige hit _play _again, the video still zoomed in. The man's head drifted from one tree to the next, supported by the silhouette of a long, thin upper body that was barely visible behind the tightly-knit leaves. He moved with a lazy, ambling kind of gait and then he disappeared, the katmon growing so closely together that they completely blocked him from view.

  


Paige leaned forward to set the video camera down on the coffee table, then she fell back against the armchair like the wind had been knocked out of her. An apprehensive silence filled the living room.

  


"What the fuck," Rey finally said.

  


"Could've just been a trick of the light." Poe didn't sound convinced at all. "Maybe a farmhand climbed up the trees and it was just a weird angle."

  


Ben nodded. "That's probably it."

  


But no one suggested replaying the video to make sure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Star Wars References:**
> 
> [Agrippa Aldrete](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Agrippa_Aldrete/Legends).
> 
> [Celana Aldrete](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Celana_Aldrete).
> 
> [Elsie](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/T-2LC).
> 
> [Belleau-a-Lir](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Belleau-a-Lir).
> 
> **Philippine References:**
> 
> [Tiyanak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiyanak).
> 
> [Tikbalang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikbalang).
> 
> The aswang is said to steal dead bodies from their coffins and leave a banana trunk in its place. In my home province, there's also a bit of folklore going around that, when a [tamawo](http://bicolanomythsofgodsandmonsters.blogspot.com/2018/12/x_25.html) falls in love with a human, they whisk them off to their realm inside the balete tree after enchanting a banana trunk to look and move exactly like that person. The trunk withers as time passes and, to all appearances, it seems that the person wastes away for some unknown reason and dies.
> 
> [Manananggal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manananggal).
> 
> What they ate for breakfast: [pandesal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandesal), [tortang talong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortang_talong), [beef tapa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapa_%28Filipino_cuisine%29).
> 
> ONLY NINETIES KIDS REMEMBER [WHITE RABBIT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rabbit_%28candy%29).
> 
> Yes, there was a [mango surplus](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/10/philippines-overflows-with-millions-of-mangoes-as-el-nino-take-effect) recently. It was wild. I ate mangoes everyday for a month sdsghk
> 
> "Nako" is short for "Hay nako," which has no exact English translation that I know of but is an expression of frustration along the lines of "My god."
> 
> The Philippine version of sticky rice is [suman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suman_%28food%29).
> 
> [A typical stilt cottage or "bahay kubo"](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcSBwCxwfL9pqOzHdUBJ8ovetqS6giWzspZELj0Lbtu_bsWlU5pt).
> 
> Yes, the older generation makes the [Sign of the Cross](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_of_the_cross) a lot. Outside of Mass, prayers, etc., I only really ever do it when I'm passing by a church xD
> 
> What they ate for dinner: [callos](https://www.kawalingpinoy.com/callos/), [pinakbet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinakbet), and [cheese ice cream](https://www.angsarap.net/2012/11/02/cheese-ice-cream/) which is the best ice cream flavor no I don't take criticism!!!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As we draw closer to Halloween, I just wanted to say that I'm absolutely thrilled that everyone is enjoying this spooky little romp so far! In this chapter we learn what's up with Finn, and we continue to ask ourselves if Ben and Rey will _ever_ work things out. Feedback would be much appreciated!

While the rum ensured that Ben slept through the rooster chorus the next morning, it had an unfortunate side effect in the form of a hangover that made the ringing alert of an incoming call about as pleasant as nails scraping against a chalkboard. Lacking the strength to lift his phone from the nightstand and press it to his ear, he settled for putting it on loudspeaker after a baleful glance at the caller ID.

  


"What is it, Mom?" he grated out, eyes still at half-mast. Rey's side of the bed was vacant and the few sunbeams that had managed to penetrate the strangler fig's branches were dancing into the room—she must have opened the window while he was asleep.

  


"Good morning to you, too." Leia's voice was droll and static-tinged and half a world away. They blundered through small talk on how Ben's vacation was going for a few agonizing minutes, and then she said, "Your grandmother phoned me about Agrippa yesterday. Oh, Ben, I'm so sad—he was a very close family friend. Practically an uncle to me, really. I can't make it to the funeral because I'm off to Koornacht tomorrow—they're on the verge of civil war and we need to intervene—but you'll go, won't you? And you'll put in at least one night at the wake?"

  


There was an uncharacteristic note of vulnerability in her tone. Ben was her proxy, after all. He thought about the farmers waving from the paddies, glad to see him because he was Leia's son. "Yes, Mom, I will."

  


_"Thank you."_

  


"It's no trouble," he muttered, taken aback by the overwhelming relief that seeped out from his mother's end of the line. "Mr. Aldrete was a good man." How trite his words sounded, how little consolation they offered in the face of Agrippa's grisly demise. And because Ben was the human embodiment of a train wreck, he couldn't stop himself from blurting out, "People are saying an _ aswang _got him."

  


"Is that so?" Leia quipped. "Well, make sure not to answer when someone knocks on the door or the windows in the middle of the night. When there's an _ aswang _ in town, the _ Kumakatok _usually aren't far behind."

  


"Mom, can we not do this?" Ben snapped, jittery from what he'd seen in the video the previous evening. "It isn't funny."

  


She paused. "Ben, is everything all right?"

  


He rubbed a weary hand over his face. "Sorry. It's just—" And he'd meant to tell her about the strange man Poe had caught on tape, but what came out of his mouth was—"I'm staying in your childhood bedroom again. The tree is kind of... unsettling."

  


Leia clicked her tongue, knowing full well which tree he was referring to. "Don't let the old superstitions of the province get to you, darling. I stayed in that room until I left for college and I turned out perfectly fine. And, anyway, people in Chianar always blame an _aswang_ every time someone's found dead in the outdoors. Load of rubbish. Where do they think they are—Belleau-a-Lir?" He could hear a mischievous smile blooming in her voice. "Now _that _is _aswang _country."

  


Ben squeezed his eyes shut. "Mom, come on."

  


"I remember when I was in high school and some girlfriends and I spent the weekend there," Leia blithely continued. "We stayed at Mama's old house, just us and the caretaker. In the middle of the night, we heard a faint, repetitive clicking from outside and everyone started panicking because, when that clicking sounds like it's coming from a long way off, that means the _ aswang _is right on top of you—"

  


_ "Mom," _Ben repeated, a little louder this time. "Cut it out."

  


She laughed and said goodbye, with one last request for him to please pass on her condolences to the Aldrete family. After hanging up, Ben got out of bed—it was almost ten in the morning and he figured that he might as well get his day started. On his way to the en suite for a quick shower, his steps slowed as he passed by the window next to the balete. Then he stopped walking altogether, reaching out to slide the capiz shell panels shut. He was unable to avoid staring into the tree's depths as he did so, and that was when it hit him—another memory, one that was visceral and terrible enough that he couldn't believe it had taken this long to resurface. Or perhaps he'd always known it was there, prowling through the corridors of his mind like an animal in a cage, eagerly anticipating the moment it would be freed.

  


There had been a woman sitting in the balete one afternoon, that summer when Ben was nine. He was flying back to Coruscant with his parents in a few hours and he'd looked out this very window to see her grinning at him from her precarious perch on the branches, dressed in torn white robes, lips stretched in mocking parody amidst the curtains of long, black hair that hung around her pale face. He'd been too startled to scream; instead, Ben had turned tail and fled the room and waited downstairs until it was time to leave for the airport.

  


He'd never told anyone about it. He'd been old enough to know that no sane adult would believe him.

  


And even now, as he stood there in front of the same window at thirty-four years of age, there was a part of him doubting his own recollections. It could have been mere childish fancy weaving hair and limbs out of an assortment of twigs and shadows and long, dripping roots. A trick of the light, or a dream.

  


Whatever it had been, Ben suddenly couldn't close the window fast enough, filled with an irrational yet stark dread that he might see her again.

  


*

  


Poe, Rey, and the Tico sisters had woken up not much earlier than Ben had and, as a result, were still polishing off the last of their breakfast when he entered the dining area.

  


"Where's Finn?" he asked.

  


Rose sighed. "He's still not feeling well—I think he's running a mild fever. I'll bring a plate up to his room and give him some paracetamol in a bit."

  


"Your grandmother went to Bible study and your grandfather's out inspecting the crops," Rey informed Ben as he sat down beside her. "They said to tell you that we'll be paying our respects to the Aldretes later tonight."

  


Ben transferred some _ tocino, _rice, and scrambled eggs from the serving dishes to his plate and tried putting himself in Rey's shoes. Attending a stranger's wake in a foreign country while being paraded around as an ex's current flame to even more strangers—his introvert side flinched in sympathy. "You don't have to come," he told her. "I'll talk to Gran. She'll understand."

  


"No, I'll go. This is important to her." She hesitated, something in her hazel eyes turning soft. "And she's important to you."

  


Ben wondered whether Rey would be singing a different tune if their friends hadn't been within earshot. They'd both agreed on this charade to avoid ruining a vacation everyone had been looking forward to for months and disappointing the grandparents he hadn't seen in fifteen years. It had seemed to be the only solution at the time but now he hated it—hated it for forcing Rey to say things she no longer meant. Things that made him _ hope, _even though he knew better.

  


The front door creaked open and Threepio shuffled inside with a sunny "Good morning" and two large sacks of mangoes that a man his age had no right to be carrying with such ease, disappearing into the walk-in kitchen. After exchanging a furtive glance with Poe, Paige went to retrieve the video camera that had been left on the coffee table. "Threepio," she said when the old man reappeared empty-handed, "can I show you something?"

  


Threepio was silent as he watched the footage that had quite thoroughly ruined last night's merry mood. Ben was holding out for some form of reassurance, some _ logical _explanation, but in the end Threepio merely shrugged as he handed the camera back to Paige. "There's lots of strange sights to be had in a place like Chianar. Once you leave the city proper, it's all people and wilderness existing side by side. That leaves you open to experiences that... might be a little hard to make sense of."

  


"I mean, I think a _ giant _ strolling around a farm is more than a _ bit _ confusing," Rey countered archly, and Ben almost wished she hadn't. The term _ giant— _he'd been thinking it, but to hear it out loud made the whole affair seem nonsensical and real all at once, in a way that made his head spin miserably.

  


"'Strange' isn't necessarily the same as 'harmful,'" Threepio replied. "Don't worry too much about giants who wander the open fields in broad daylight. We call them _mantiw, _and they're generally peaceful as long as you don't get in their way. It's their cousins—the _kapre_ who live in the trees and stir at night—that you have to watch out for."

  


An image of the balete flashed through Ben's mind. The others all turned to look at him once Threepio had taken his leave.

  


"Was he joking?" Poe hissed. "Solo, tell me he was joking."

  


"No idea," Ben admitted. "It's always hard to tell with Threepio."

  


*

  


_ **HIJO WAT S REY'S SIZE DRESS N SHOE TXTBAK TNX** _

  


Ben raised an eyebrow at his phone. His grandmother texted like his mother. At least now he knew where Leia got it from. He shot off a quick reply from where he was sitting on the porch watching the girls play Uno while Poe dozed in the hammock strung up out in the yard, figuring that Breha was purchasing something that Rey could wear to the wake.

  


_ **U HAV BLAK SHIRT? POLO** _

  


_ **Yes, Gran.** _

  


_ **K** _

  


Breha's gray SkyWind pulled into the driveway an hour later and Rey accepted the shopping bags thrust into her hands without protest, Ben having given her ample warning that his grandmother would be severely offended by any and all attempts to reimburse. They dutifully went upstairs to get ready and, a while later, Ben was sitting on the edge of the four-poster bed, in the aforementioned polo shirt and dark jeans and Nikes, and fiddling with the clasp of the Vacheron Constantin around his wrist when Rey hesitantly walked out of the en suite in black ballet flats and a lacy black dress with a sweetheart neckline and an empire waist. She'd shrugged on a baggy white cardigan despite the evening being nowhere near cool enough to warrant it, but this minor oddity fled Ben's mind because her skirt flared around her knees in a way that accentuated her long, slender legs.

  


_ Fuck. _ Ben was keenly aware that he was gawking, but he couldn't stop. _ I miss those legs wrapped around my waist. _ Rey had been spending most of this vacation in either denim cutoffs or leggings, paired with over-sized shirts and ratty sneakers; seeing her in a dress, particularly one with all those delicately feminine bits of lace, did _ something _to his libido. Had they still been together he would most likely be going in for a quickie right about now, absolutely not giving a shit that his grandparents were waiting downstairs.

  


But they _ weren't _together, and that made the sight of her almost unbearable.

  


Rey lowered her gaze as she passed by, tactfully pretending not to notice his scrutiny. "Should I wear my hair up?" she asked, studying herself in one of the three full-length mirrors that paneled the wardrobe's exterior.

  


Ben imagined pressing his lips to her bare neck while she arranged her hair into those quirky three buns that he adored, imagined hiking that maddening dress up around her golden thighs and just _ taking _her against the wardrobe while she watched their reflections with parted lips and flushed cheeks. He'd make her attend that wake in panties filled with come—

  


_ I'm going to hell, _ he thought with no small amount of morose resignation. He'd never be one of those wooden saints holding court downstairs, but _ this _was a new low altogether. Agrippa Aldrete was cursing him from the afterlife. Ben chalked it up to the enforced celibacy of these past two months; Rey had taken to claiming she was too tired on the rare occasions that their schedules had coincided, and then the big fight had happened, driving the final nail into their relationship's coffin, and she'd begun sleeping in the guest bedroom.

  


"Ben?" She glanced over at him, still waiting for his answer to her question.

  


"Do whatever you want," he mumbled. Sulking because it was the only recourse he had left.

  


Rey frowned, looking hurt and bewildered all at once. Then she retreated behind the same inscrutable mask she'd started wearing more and more often since they called it quits, and she didn't speak to him again until they were in the car with his grandparents. She wore her hair down.

  


*

  


The Aldrete mansion was a sixteen-minute drive away. Instead of the somber affair Ben had been expecting, it was an explosion of light and sound and movement and smells amidst the dark country night. Plastic tables and chairs had been set out on the front yard to accommodate the overflow of visitors, and people were helping themselves to a lavish spread of _ arroz a la valenciana, _cheese pimiento sandwiches, shrimp-topped stir-fried noodles, chicken and ginger congee, potato salad, baked macaroni, goat stewed in tomato sauce, and mango icebox cake, as well as coolers laden with soda and beer. Hordes of children were running around in a helter-skelter game of tag, ducking and weaving through clusters of middle-aged aunties playing mahjong and men hunched over poker cards amidst billowing clouds of cigarette smoke.

  


"The objective," Breha told Ben and Rey as Threepio steered the SkyWind into the queue of vehicles depositing their passengers in front of the house, "is to make as much noise as possible. To drive away evil spirits."

  


"I want a karaoke machine at my wake," Bail declared. Hissing through her teeth, Breha slapped his knee with one hand and crossed herself with the other, but he cheerfully continued, "My only request is that no one sing _ My Way. _Can't risk adding to the statistics."

  


"The statistics?" Rey echoed.

  


"Gramps is talking about the _ My Way _ killings," Ben explained. "It's a... social phenomenon here in Alderaan. Quite a number of people have gotten shot or stabbed to death in karaoke bars during the fighting that tends to break out whenever somebody sings _ My Way." _

  


Rey blinked. "Like... the song by Frank Sinatra?"

  


"Yes." Ben cringed inwardly at the dubious amazement that was radiating off of his ex in waves. Why did his mother's homeland have to be so goddamn _ weird? _"There's a perfectly logical explanation for it. It's a popular song, and when someone messes up the lyrics or sings out of tune in a room full of belligerent drunks—you get the picture."

  


"Has it been known to happen with any other song?"

  


Ben hesitated. "Just _ My Way." _

  


"Huh."

  


A current of excitement jolted through the crowd when Bail, Breha, Ben, and Rey got out of the car. Soon enough, Ben was witnessing his grandparents in their natural element, all charms and social graces as they caught up with old friends, made new acquaintances, and introduced their Coruscanti grandson and his girlfriend. After twenty minutes had passed, they were still only halfway to the front door of the house, and Ben was slowly dying inside. It was a combination of being the object of such intense scrutiny and the fact that Alderaanians had _ zero _concept of personal space. He was bear-hugged and smothered in cheek kisses, his hair ruffled three times, his arm pinched just as many times. It was like being mobbed by dozens of well-meaning zombies. Rey was the only one who noticed his increasing discomfort, the only one who'd learned all his tells—the twitch under his eye, the clenching of his fists. She gently grabbed hold of his hand and slipped her fingers through the spaces between his, and he held on like a lifeline as her touch soothed him like it always had. Like nothing had changed.

  


They eventually managed to enter the house, which offered the same basic interior and abundance of religious iconography as the Organas'—the key difference being that all the mirrors were draped in black cloth and there was an ivory casket in the center of the living room, where Agrippa Aldrete lay in state, surrounded by orchid wreaths and rosary beads made from rose petals, their sweet, cloying perfume hanging heavy in the air.

  


"Why are all the mirrors covered up?" Rey asked Ben.

  


"To avoid seeing the dead in the reflection," drawled a cool, wry voice behind them. They turned to see a woman of around Breha's age, with piercing dark eyes and a sophisticated mien. Her hair was snow-white instead of the deep brown that Ben remembered. Like his grandparents, she, too, had shrunk beneath the weight of the years. "I was extra diligent about it because my late husband did _ so _love his pranks. I wouldn't put it past him to give me a heart attack so I'd follow him into the afterlife."

  


"Celana." Breha rushed forward, kissing Agrippa's widow on both cheeks. "My deepest condolences. How are you doing?"

  


"As well as can be expected, if a bit in shock," Celana replied. "At our age, Breha, dear, we all think we're going to die in our beds, don't we?" She exchanged greetings with Bail and accepted his sympathies, then turned to Ben and Rey with the faintest trace of a genuine smile. "But I am truly glad to see Leia's little boy again! Although you're not so little now, are you, Ben Solo?"

  


"I guess not," Ben mumbled. "I'm sorry we couldn't meet again in happier circumstances. This is my girlfriend, Rey—" He started to place his hand on the small of Rey's back, and it was only then that he realized their fingers were still intertwined. For some reason, he made no move to let go, and neither did she.

  


Celana's smile widened and softened all at once, as if she found the two of them endearing. "It's nice to meet you, Rey. Now, why don't the four of you go and say your prayers over my poor husband, then I'll make sure you're fed. There's _ lechon _in the dining room. Don't worry, Bail, I saved the ears for you."

  


"You're a remarkable woman, Celana," Bail said solemnly.

  


"The ears?" Rey muttered to Ben.

  


"You'll see," he responded in kind.

  


The mortician had done an excellent job on Agrippa's corpse. He looked like he was sleeping. They hadn't put shoes on him—a common practice Leia had told him about, Ben remembered, to ensure that the footsteps of the dead wouldn't echo through the house. Ben and Rey stood awkwardly by as Bail and Breha quietly prayed in front of the casket, their hands folded and their heads bowed. Not really knowing any prayers himself—he'd probably get struck by lightning if he tried to say any, anyway—Ben settled for a few moments of respectful silence.

  


"Oh, _ cariño," _ he heard Breha murmur sadly. He glanced to his left to see that there were a few tears streaming down Bail's cheeks, glistening in the light of the candles. Breha was gently dabbing at her husband's face with a kerchief. "It's all right, just let it out. Agrippa would have been very offended if his good friend _ didn't _cry at his wake."

  


Bail nodded. He regained his composure after a while, placing a hand over the part of the glass under which Agrippa's own right hand lay at his side, a rosary wound around his ashen, bloodless wrist. "We'll meet again someday," Bail told the dead man. And Ben wondered about faith, and what it was good for, and the part it played in stemming the tides of grief.

  


*

  


His grandfather cheered up at around the same time Rey learned what Celana had meant by _ saving the ears. _ They were ushered into the dining area that was reserved for family members and close friends and there, on the table, resting in all its glory atop a bed of banana leaves, was the _ lechon— _a whole roast pig, its skin glossy brown and shatteringly crisp and cut open in several places to reveal the soft, fatty white meat inside.

  


"The ears are the best part," Bail declared before contentedly diving in.

  


Never one to turn down food even when it was literally staring her in the face, Rey tackled the _ lechon _like a pro after she and Ben had sat down next to three women in their late sixties, one of whom was Agrippa's younger cousin and appeared to be taking serious issue with the night's menu.

  


"I can't believe Celana served _ pancit," _Alya Aldrete complained, referring to the stir-fried noodle dish. "This will lengthen the mourning period, for sure. She should have saved it for after the funeral, so we would all have long lives."

  


"She probably didn't know, or she forgot," said Neena. "It's hard to keep track sometimes. In my mother's hometown, you're not supposed to serve anything with moringa leaves. One family did, at their patriarch's wake, and, _ nako, _they all died one after the other in a span of two years."

  


"All this doom and gloom!" huffed the third woman, Jens Cross. "I'd much rather talk about happier things. Like, for example, Ben and his girlfriend."

  


Ben nearly choked on his glass of water and Rey froze, cheeks bulging with a mouthful of _ lechon _and rice, as the three spinsters turned to them.

  


"Tell us," Jens urged, "how did the two of you meet?"

  


"His car broke down," Breha couldn't resist answering from further up the table. "She was the part-time mechanic who came to fix it."

  


"That's _ adorable," _gushed Neena. "Did you start dating right away?"

  


"No," Ben said. He was twenty-nine again and standing on that lonely stretch of highway between Coruscant and Chandrila with his hands on his hips, the tip of his leather shoe scuffed from kicking his useless TIE Silencer in a fit of rage. It was an overcast day, the pine trees a dark emerald green against the gun-metal clouds, and he was watching the girl in a sunshine-yellow shirt and grease-stained overalls stride up to him with her toolbox and falling head-over-heels in love the moment he looked into her hazel eyes. "She hated me at first."

  


The women gasped like they couldn't _ imagine _someone hating Breha Organa's grandson. "But why?" cried Alya.

  


"He was an ass," Rey defended herself. "Wouldn't even look at me, didn't bother saying thanks when I was done fixing his pretentious car—"

  


"I was flustered," Ben interrupted. "You were so pretty."

  


Rey rolled her eyes as their audience squealed in delight. "It was a patch-up job and he still had a long drive ahead of him, so I gave him my personal number in case he broke down again. He didn't, but he messaged me the next day."

  


Bail nodded in approval. "My grandson is so smooth, like me."

  


Breha snorted. "Bail Organa, need I remind you of the time you accidentally serenaded my ailing grandfather because you thought you were singing outside _ my _window?"

  


At this, the whole table exploded with guffaws. Bail made a face, rubbing his forehead like he was remembering an injury from long ago. "Old man Antilles opened his window and threw a shoe at me, for all my trouble."

  


Even Ben found himself smiling at the anecdote. It was a smile that was quick to fade, however, when Jens directed the conversation back to the original topic. "So, Ben and Rey, when's the wedding?" she demanded.

  


"We haven't really talked about that yet," Ben hastened to tell her as Rey ever so coincidentally found her plate to be more fascinating than ever before.

  


Breha clucked her tongue. "Don't ask them things like that!" she chided Jens. "Coruscanti culture is very different, as you know—"

  


"But, Breha, don't you want great-grandchildren?"

  


"Of course I do, but—"

  


Rey stood up. "Sorry, I'm feeling a bit ill—I think I need some fresh air."

  


*

  


He followed her outside, elbowing through the masses of visitors until he caught up with her at the edge of the lawn, where they thankfully had a modicum of privacy. They had arrived at six-thirty in the evening; two hours had passed since then and the full moon now glowed above the treetops, bathing Rey in silver light as she whirled around to glare at him.

  


"This was a mistake," she spat, shoulders slumping with all the heartsickness and defeat that had steadily been creeping up on Ben since they arrived on Sanctuary Coast, when he witnessed her first glimpse of that unspoiled white-sand paradise and it struck him that this was the last beautiful place in the world that he'd ever be able to take her to. "We should've come clean right from the start."

  


"I warned you that people here were nosy," Ben tersely reminded her. "I told you they'd ask questions like—like _ that. _But you didn't want to ruin your friends' vacation and you said you could handle it—"

  


"I thought I could!" Rey hissed. "But now I just feel like a dick because—_ God, _ Ben, your grandparents— _ everyone _ is being so nice to me and I'm _ lying _ to them and—" Her breath hitched on a barely-restrained sob, eyes shining with a sudden onslaught of tears that she furiously blinked away. "And when we act like everything's okay I actually start to _ believe _ it, and it's scary how much part of me still _ wants _to believe—and I just—I can't—"

  


"You can't what? You _ can't do this anymore?" _Ben snarled, throwing what she'd said the day their relationship ended back in her face. "Rey Niima being the first to give up? How novel."

  


"You made partner at that shitty law firm a year ago and you haven't been the same person since," Rey grated out. "A _ year, _ Ben. I didn't give up for a _ year." _

  


There were things he could have said in that moment. Things like, _ I tried to keep all of it together, I tried to go home early whenever I could, there were sacrifices I had to make so I'd be able to give you the life you deserved, you should have said something while there was still time to fix it, how could I have known that I was sacrificing _ us, _ why can't we try again? _But before he was able to say any of it, a hush bloomed like a ripple of dark water over the guests behind him and Rey's gaze settled on a point over his shoulder.

  


Ben turned around to see what had caused the tides of various conversations to ebb. A woman had arrived—on foot, from the looks of it—and was now standing at the boundary where the front yard met the sidewalk, only a few feet away from him and Rey. She couldn't have been older than fifty-five or younger than forty-nine, dressed in black with thick, graying hair that fell almost to her waist, and she was staring at the Aldrete house with something like—something like _ hunger. _Something that reminded Ben of a vulture circling a carcass.

  


It didn't escape his notice that several people in the crowd looked afraid, others angry. Some had called their children over and appeared to be doing their best to shield the little ones from the woman's line of sight—or perhaps that was just Ben's imagination at work again. Still, whoever this stranger was, it couldn't have been more clear that she was unwelcome.

  


"Maybe we should go back inside," Ben told Rey.

  


"I need some space," she bluntly replied. "You go on ahead."

  


He was torn between leaving her alone out here, so close to the new arrival that was making everyone uneasy, and not wanting to draw out their fight with his insistence. In the end he settled for hunkering down in one of the vacant rattan chairs on the front porch, nursing a beer while the other guests seemed to come to a consensus that the best way to handle the strange woman's presence was to ignore it. Gradually the games and the chatter picked up again, although none of the kids were playing tag anymore. As if their parents had forbidden them from straying too far.

  


The problem with sitting out on the porch by himself was that it made Ben an easy magnet for people coming over to chat. They asked about his work and his love life, reminisced about Leia, and had no shortage of thinly-veiled insults for Han. Another hour passed and Ben was on his second beer when he noticed, much to his chagrin, that Rey had struck up a conversation with the strange woman, the two of them forming their own little island at the edge of the sea that was the bustling throng.

  


Before he could decide what to do, someone dropped a hand on his shoulder and stooped down to kiss his cheek. "Hello, Ben."

  


"Aunt Winter." Ben made to stand and pull up a chair for his mother's childhood friend—whom he saw about once a year whenever she dropped by Coruscant—but Winter Celchu waved him off.

  


"I've been sitting for _ hours, _gossiping in the parlor with the old biddies," she explained. "My ass is cramping."

  


Ben smirked. "I'm surprised none of them have turned in yet. It's late."

  


"Well, of course, it's a wake. We have to stay up." Winter retrieved a pack of Marlboros from her purse and lit up, exhaling silver fumes into the balmy night air. "Gotta watch over the corpse so no one replaces it with the trunk of a banana tree." She rolled her eyes even as she said it.

  


"With all the crucifixes and rosaries and little saints inside the house, I doubt that there's an evil spirit who could get anywhere _ near _the coffin," Ben quipped.

  


Winter smirked down at him. "Ah, kid, but what are Catholic props to Alderaanian monsters? People were barring their windows against the _ aswang _long before Catholicism came to our shores." She took another drag from her cigarette, her brow furrowing as she squinted at the edge of the yard. "What's your girlfriend doing talking to crazy old Dosmit?"

  


Ben tensed up. "Should I go get her?" If the strange woman was dangerous—

  


Winter shook her head. "No, no, that was uncharitable of me. Dosmit's a bit weird but she's harmless. She moved here from the neighboring city half a year ago and set up a little convenience store. Not that anyone ever buys anything from her."

  


"Why not?" Ben asked.

  


Winter shot him a teasing, conspiratorial glance. "Because she's an _ aswang." _ Ben groaned and she laughed, holding up her cigarette as if in surrender. "I'm kidding! But you know what people around here are like. Dosmit lives alone, doesn't have any family, _ certainly _doesn't have any friends, always wears black—it's the perfect recipe for folks to go around saying shit about you. Including that you killed Agrippa Aldrete and ate his liver."

  


"She wouldn't come to his wake, then, surely."

  


"Maybe she's scouting for her next victim."

  


Ben made a face. "You and Mom are so alike."

  


Winter laughed again. "I'll take that as a compliment."

  


*

  


It was almost midnight by the time Ben and Rey left the wake with his grandparents. Rey waved to Dosmit before getting into the car and, as a yawning Threepio drove off, Ben glanced back to see the woman standing motionless on the sidewalk, silhouetted beneath the full moon. Her eyes shone in the golden beams of the taillights; she was staring after the car the same way she'd stared at the Aldrete house, and Ben repressed a shudder.

  


"We have to drop by somewhere else first so that Agrippa's spirit won't follow us home," Breha remarked as casually as if she were talking about the weather. "How do you kids feel about ice cream?"

  


And so it was that Ben and Rey found themselves standing in the parking lot of the local 7-11, dutifully scarfing down orange-flavored popsicles while Threepio, Bail, and Breha waited inside the SkyWind.

  


"Does this mean Mr. Aldrete's ghost is going to haunt the 7-11 from now on?" Rey quipped, her wet lips stained sunset. The fight was still fresh on both their minds but they had to talk about _ something, _else the people in the car started getting suspicious because they were giving each other the cold shoulder.

  


"Better the 7-11 than my grandparents' house." Ben couldn't bring himself to look at her directly, not when she was licking the popsicle with the enthusiasm that Rey always had for food. "What were you and Dosmit talking about?"

  


"Just things. Her house isn't far from your grandparents' estate—maybe a ten-minute walk. I might visit her sometime."

  


Ben contemplated forbidding Rey from doing something she wanted to do, then decided he valued his life too much. They finished their popsicles, tossing the sticks into a nearby garbage bin, and went back to the car. It was a quiet drive home, not in the least because his grandparents were already nodding off. The moon hung over empty roads and squat buildings and rolling fields, its radiance almost white-hot, almost like daylight, raining down from a sky unfettered by city neon. And finally it hung over the balete tree that loomed beside the Organa house, hulking and still, wide branches spread out like a hundred waiting arms.

  


*

  


In the early morning, Ben woke up to the acrid, _ burning _stench of cigar smoke. His eyes started to water the moment he opened them, as if the cigar in question had been rolled in cardboard and mud. He shot out of bed and, still half-asleep, stumbled over to the window that Rey must have opened again last night. Something stirred amidst the leaves outside and a surge of adrenaline coursed through him, jolting him into wakefulness.

  


—_ I can't see it now, if I see it now that means it's all real, that means we're not safe, that means I was never safe— _

  


Ben didn't know if by _ it _he was thinking of the red eyes or the woman in white, those two greatest unexplained mysteries of his childhood, but, whatever the case, he shut the window with a speed he hadn't realized he was capable of. Then he just stood there, breathing harshly, surveying the room as he fought to clear his head.

  


According to the antique clock on the wall, it was five in the morning. The rooster chorus had yet to reach full tilt, for the moment consisting of nothing more than a few scattered warbles and sleepy clucks. Rey's side of the bed was empty but a strip of fluorescent light glowed beneath the bathroom door and Ben heard the unmistakable sound of retching, muffled by old wood.

  


"You smelled it as well?" Ben asked when Rey emerged from the bathroom, thinking that the odor of cigar smoke had been what caused her to vomit.

  


Rey's brow creased as she wiped her mouth. "Smell what?"

  


"Never mind," he said hurriedly. Now that he was more awake, there wasn't a trace of the scent left in the air. He must have been imagining things again, or perhaps he'd dreamed it. "Are you okay?"

  


"Yeah." She flashed a wry, oddly polite smile. "I must have eaten too much last night."

  


A couple of sharp knocks at the door broke the morning calm. Ben's first instinct was to jump out of his skin as Leia's warning leapt to the forefront of his consciousness—_ "When there's an _ aswang _ in town, the _ Kumakatok _ usually aren't far behind"— _but he was quick to admonish himself for his ridiculousness as Rey threw the door open.

  


It was Rose, all messy-haired and barefoot and still in her pajamas, as if she'd just tumbled out of bed. "Guys," she whispered, her face drained of color, "something's really, _ really _wrong with Finn."

  


*

  


Finn's left leg had swollen to twice its normal size. The skin was mottled purple and black, releasing a sickly sweet smell that was not unlike rotting fruit. He was delirious, eyes rolling into the back of his head, body thrashing wildly atop the sheets while Poe and Ben held him down so that Rose could press a cold cloth to his forehead in an attempt to soak up the fever as Rey frantically examined the afflicted limb.

  


"It was fine yesterday," Rose babbled. "He said it itched just below the kneecap but otherwise it was _ fine. _ Then I woke up because he was shaking and the blankets were _ drenched _in sweat—and his leg was—was—" She faltered, gesturing helplessly at what lay further down the bed, rank and twisted and bulbous, more like a bloated slab of decaying meat than anything that could have been attached to a living, breathing human being.

  


"I can't find a wound," Rey muttered just as Paige rushed back into the room, Breha in tow. "There's no broken skin, there's _ nothing—" _

  


"Could it have been the ant bites?" Poe suggested. "Maybe he had, shit, I don't know, some kind of delayed reaction—"

  


"Ant bites?" Breha repeated sharply, prompting Paige to recount to her how Finn had tripped over the dirt mound the other day.

  


Understanding dawned on Breha's face at the same time that Rey tried to lift Finn's swollen leg in a continued bid to discover the entry point of the infection. Finn _ screamed— _a bloodcurdling roar of sheer agony that Ben would never forget for as long as he lived.

  


"We have to get him to a hospital!" Rose burst out. "Please, can we—"

  


"They won't be able to do anything for him there," Breha said. Several pairs of eyes swung towards her, wide with shock and disbelief, but she focused only on Rose, ignoring everyone else. "Rose, do you trust me?"

  


It took a while, but Rose eventually nodded.

  


"Good. Then come with me." Breha took the younger woman's arm. "The rest of you, stay here. Keep Finn as comfortable as you can."

  


"What? _ No!" _ Poe tightened his grip on Finn's shoulder, agitated. "Mrs. Organa, _ please, _we need to rush him to the ER—"

  


"Time is of the essence," Breha interrupted. "Do you want to save your friend's life? _ Then listen to me." _

  


It probably came with the territory of being the former president—she spoke with an aura of command that was impossible to ignore. Still, Ben had been disappointing his family all his life and he saw no reason to stop now, blocking his grandmother's path before she and Rose could leave the room.

  


"Gran," he said in a low, urgent tone, "we can't leave Finn like this. He needs treatment. He needs a doctor. Everyone's scared and worried out of their minds and I'm the one who brought them here and you need to give me _ something." _

  


Breha stared up at him for several long moments, eyes hard as flint, before finally relenting. "I'll get Dr. Insevade to make a house call." Shaking her head, she led Rose away and Ben heard her mumble under her breath, "Too much like his mother."

  


*

  


The physician showed up not long after Rose and Breha left. Scratching his head, Insevade prescribed a course of antibiotics and gave Finn something for the pain and the fever, advising hospitalization if the situation didn't improve by nightfall. And he must have administered the _ really good _drugs because, by the time Rose and Breha returned an hour later, Finn was fast asleep, with only the odd twitch and whimper here and there.

  


The unmistakable smell of Vicks VapoRub stung Ben's nostrils as Breha smeared generous amounts of the mentholated ointment on Finn's brow. "This will help with the fever," she told the anxious group. "And there's hot chocolate downstairs to help with your nerves. The best thing we can do for him right now is to let him rest."

  


*

  


It was Rose who broke the tense silence that settled over the dining table after they'd been shooed out of her and Finn's room. "Mrs. Organa wrapped some food in banana leaves and grabbed a bottle of Coke from the fridge, then Threepio drove us to the creek," she recounted, sounding baffled—for good reason, Ben thought. "She told me to place the food and the soda at the base of the anthill—or what was left of it, at least—and I did. And we went back here." Her round face scrunched up in confusion. "I don't understand what happened. I don't understand why we did that."

  


"This is a load of bull," Poe said loudly. "All these superstitions—hell, I'll drive Finn to the hospital myself if I have to, let's _ go—" _

  


He began to stand up but Rose continued speaking, still in that same hazy tone, "As we drove away from the creek, I looked back and there was _ someone... _A squat, dark figure no bigger than a child, poking around the anthill..."

  


"Someone's kid running around, maybe?" Paige suggested. "Probably jumped at the chance for free snacks."

  


Rose shook her head. "The sun hadn't fully risen yet, so I couldn't see its features too clearly, but it looked—that is, I think—" She swallowed. "It had a _ beard. _ It _ waved _at me."

  


*

  


Finn's fever cooled in the early afternoon. The swelling in his leg started to abate and, by the time a purple dusk fell shivering on the sleepy fields of Chianar, it was completely gone.

  


*

  


Ben found his grandmother in her office on the second floor. He sat down across from her as she went through the pile of correspondence stacked neatly on her desk, reading glasses perched on the bridge of her nose. He couldn't remember when he'd last seen someone replying to actual _ letters _that had come in the mail.

  


"Coke?" he finally prompted.

  


"It was the only thing in the fridge that wouldn't spill during the drive. Besides, it's symbolic, more than anything else."

  


"Symbolic of _ what, _Gran?"

  


"An offering," Breha replied. "An apology. The anthill was destroyed, so the old man who lived there had to be placated."

  


"The old man," Ben echoed woodenly.

  


"The old man of the mound," Breha elaborated. "The _ nuno—" _ Her brow wrinkled as she cast around for a suitable translation—"the _ ancestor. _ A very old type of spirit, and quite territorial, too. That's probably why you found that soccer ball—whoever kicked it over there wasn't fool enough to try and retrieve it. That's _ trespassing." _

  


Ben stared at her, thinking about the strange sensation he'd felt when he and the others had ventured near the creek. How it had seemed like that particular piece of land belonged to someone else. But that was ridiculous, wasn't it? Just an old wives' tale...

  


"_ Or, _Finn is allergic to ant bites and Dr. Insevade gave him the right medication to counter it." Breha's eyes twinkled with a hint of droll mischief behind her glasses. "The Vicks definitely helped, too."

  


Ben didn't say anything. Breha scribbled a few lines onto a sheet of cream-colored stationery, then paused to smile softly at him. "It's really up to you what to believe, _ hijo. _In the end, your friend is okay, and isn't that what matters?"

  


Ben mulled it over. She was taking pity on him, offering him an easy way out. He was almost ashamed to take it, but the alternative was even scarier. "I guess you're right," he said. "Thanks, Gran."

  


*

  


Dr. Insevade returned, pronounced the sleeping Finn to be as right as rain, and was summarily ushered downstairs by Bail and Breha with the insistence that he join them for dinner. Rey had been quiet for most of the day but, the moment Ben's grandparents and the physician left what had temporarily become a sickroom, she burst into tears of relief.

  


No one was particularly surprised; Rey had a reputation in their group for being simultaneously emotionally constipated while also capable of crying at the drop of a hat. Poe, Paige, and Rose all turned to look at Ben, fully expecting him to console his weeping girlfriend, and—trying not to display any trace of fear that she might rebuff his attempts—Ben went over to her and folded her into his arms.

  


She didn't rebuff his attempts. Instead, she collapsed against him, burying her face in his chest. "I was so _ worried." _ Her trembling words were muffled into his shirt. "So, _ so _worried—I thought Finn wouldn't make it—"

  


The rush of protectiveness that coursed through Ben was overwhelming in its fierceness. "I know," he murmured, hunching over her, kissing the top of her head. How easy it was to forget, once they were touching. How easy it was to fall back into it. "I know, it's all right, he's fine, everything's fine."

  


She cried harder, like the tenderness in his voice had broken through some wall she'd built around herself. Telling the others to go on ahead to dinner, Ben led Rey back to their room, guiding her onto the bed. They lay down together and she flung her arms and legs around his body as if she were drowning and he was the only thing keeping her head above water, and he continued mumbling reassurances and rubbing her back in soothing, haphazard circles as she sobbed her heart out. Some people would have considered her reaction disproportionate to what had actually _ happened, _but Ben knew where this was coming from. He'd held her like this the day Paige survived the plane crash two years ago and Rey had cried even harder than Poe and Rose combined.

  


There were some things that Rey Niima would always carry from her childhood. She lived in mortal fear of losing the people she loved, of being left behind.

  


_ "A _ year, _ Ben," _ he remembered her telling him the previous evening, looking pale in the moonlight, haunted like all of his ghosts. _ "I didn't give up for a _year."

  


How bad had it been, then—how bad had _ he _been—that she finally let him go?

  


Ben nuzzled at the crook where Rey's neck met her shoulder, inhaling her familiar scent of sun-warmed skin and lemon-drop cologne. Soon her breathing evened out, whimpers and shuddering gasps fading into the deep, easy rhythm of sleep, and it wasn't long before he, too, drifted off, wrapped up in her arms the same way she was wrapped up in his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Star Wars References:**
> 
> [The Koornacht Cluster](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Koornacht_Cluster/Legends).
> 
> [The SkyWind III](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/SkyWind_III).
> 
> [Alya Aldrete](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Alya_Aldrete).
> 
> [Neena](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Neena).
> 
> [Jens Cross](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Jens_Cross).
> 
> [Dosmit Raeh](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Dosmit_R%C3%A6h).
> 
> [Winter Celchu](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Winter_Celchu).
> 
> [Trevor Insevade](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Trevor_Insevade).
> 
> **Philippine References:**
> 
> [The Kumakatok](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumakatok).
> 
> There is a variant of aswang known as the "tiktik" that has a distinctive cry. If it sounds near, that means it's still far away and you have time to run or to prepare to defend yourself. But if it sounds like it's coming from a distance, that means it's already at your house.
> 
> [Tocino](https://www.kawalingpinoy.com/pork-tocino/). 
> 
> [The mantiw](https://www.aswangproject.com/mantiw/).
> 
> [The kapre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapre).
> 
> What they ate at the wake: [arroz a la valenciana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arroz_a_la_valenciana), [pancit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancit), [arroz caldo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arroz_caldo), [kaldereta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaldereta), [lechon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lechon).
> 
> The "My Way" killings are [a thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Way_killings). No, I don't know how to explain it either.
> 
> The practice of going somewhere else before heading home after a wake (so that evil spirits or the deceased person's ghost won't follow you to your house) is so deeply entrenched in Filipino culture that there's even a viral screenshot of an official 7-11 social media account asking people to stop hanging out at their store after a wake because they're already being haunted by so many ghosts due to that custom xD
> 
> [Nuno sa punso](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuno_sa_punso).


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BOO! 👻

At breakfast the next morning, Finn could recall very little of his ordeal. He ate ravenously, with Ben and Rey giving him a run for his money as they'd also slept through dinner. The group arrived at a consensus to just spend the day lazing around the house; everyone was shaken up, although they were hard-pressed to admit it. The face in the trees, the rumors of the  _ aswang,  _ Finn's injury, the small, bearded figure that Rose had seen—it was all a bit  _ much,  _ and well-deserving of the tired old adage that Ben heard Paige grumble to Rose, "I'm going to need a vacation from this vacation."

  
  


He privately agreed. He'd woken up to find that he and Rey had unconsciously shifted positions in their sleep and were  _ spooning,  _ and he was hard against her backside. A cold shower had taken care of that, but he was still a mess. He could still feel her breathing softly against him, something he hadn't realized he'd missed with every ounce of his soul until he was able to savor it again.

  
  


Retreating to his grandparents' library on the second floor, Ben whiled away a good couple of hours browsing the impressive collection of books on every subject imaginable. Several dated back to Bail and Breha's college years and a good number were even older than that, their spines worn and their pages yellow and brittle with age.

  
  


The patter of rain served to lure Ben out—after the scorching temperatures of the last several days, the prospect of feeling cool air on his skin and looking up at a daytime sky that wouldn't burn his retinas off was too tantalizing to ignore. He wandered out onto the second-floor balcony only to find that—one, it was already occupied by Rey and Threepio and, two, it was indeed drizzling but the sun was still as bright as ever. Stretched out on a lounge chair, Rey was holding a young green coconut in both hands; the top had been hacked open and she was slurping at the juice inside with a bright blue straw.

  
  


"There you are." Threepio held out a wooden tray bearing a second coconut, similarly furnished with a red straw. Ben took it and sat down on the chair beside Rey's as Threepio placed the tray on a nearby coffee table.

  
  


"Could we get—" Ben started to ask, but Threepio immediately nodded at the tray, which bore two spoons that Ben hadn't noticed before.

  
  


"You're so much like Leia," the old man remarked with taciturn fondness. "She was always more excited about scraping out the meat than drinking the juice." The drizzle chose that moment to pick up its pace, and Threepio's dark eyes drifted to the scene that lay beyond the balcony, cascades of rain falling on the treetops from a clear blue, sunlit sky. "A  _ tikbalang  _ is getting married."

  
  


Ben and Rey looked at him curiously and he went on to explain, "That's what we say around here when it rains while the sun is shining. The  _ tikbalang  _ is a kind of trickster figure who enjoys leading travelers astray in the forest. Has the body of a man but the head and legs of a horse."

  
  


"Well, I'm glad he was able to find love, despite all that," Rey joked. "You know, Threepio, from everything Ben told me about Alderaan, I never got the impression that it was—that it had so much folklore."

  
  


"Well, the last time Ben was here in Chianar, he was a child. It's normal for children to forget things as they grow older," Threepio replied, and Ben shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "When he visited at nineteen, we all stayed in Aldera City. That's a busy, modern place. Not a lot of room for the old ways to take root and grow along with the skyscrapers. Things are different here in the province, though, where belief in things like the  _ aswang  _ is a living belief. Everyone knows someone who knows someone else who saw one. Hell, we all grow up knowing how to  _ become  _ one."

  
  


Ben blinked. "Sorry, what? Become an  _ aswang?" _

  
  


"Sure," Threepio said cheerfully. "You take a fertilized chicken egg and hold it against your belly, tying it into place with a strip of cloth. After several days—or weeks, or a month, no one's ever really been able to agree—the chick will pass from the egg into your stomach, and then you put the empty eggshell in a bamboo tube with a mixture of coconut oil and chicken dung. Come the next full moon, you smear the paste all over your body to begin the transformation process."

  
  


"I'm literally the girl laughing nervously and saying 'What the fuck' in that meme right now," Rey deadpanned, but her face was alight with fascination and she appeared to be hanging on to Threepio's every word.

  
  


_ Everyone loves a good urban legend,  _ Ben mused to himself.  _ We're the only species that  _ enjoys  _ being scared. _

  
  


"Even Aldera City has its own little pockets of superstition," Threepio added. "There's a street there called Balete Drive, so named because of the strangler figs that used to line it before they were all chopped down. It's said to be haunted by a  _ kaperosa— _ the ghost of a woman dressed in long, white robes. You're not supposed to look in your rear-view mirror when you drive through there, or else you'll see her staring blankly at you from the backseat."

  
  


The memory—or the memory of a dream or a trick of the light—of the woman grinning at him from the tree outside the window hit Ben like a sledgehammer. His heart constricted in his chest. Suddenly it wasn't  _ fun  _ anymore, and he was more than relieved when Threepio left him and Rey to their coconuts and their own devices.

  
  


*

  
  


The next four days were uneventful yet pleasant. The group went to a museum, a bee farm, and a butterfly garden. They hiked up to a waterfall. They ate their way through the mango surplus. Ben played chess with his grandfather in the afternoons and he and Rey suffered through a handful of coffee dates with Breha and her friends. It was all staggeringly  _ normal  _ compared to the weird stuff that had happened when they first arrived, but no one said anything about it until the evening they went to a karaoke bar in the city—thankfully, no one selected  _ My Way— _ and took a cab back to the Organa house since Threepio had taken a few days off to visit some friends in the neighboring city.

  
  


"You know what I think?" Poe slurred from the backseat, where he was crammed in with Finn, Rose, Paige, and Rey. "I think it's going to be all right now. Those first few days, it kind of felt like the land was just making itself  _ known  _ to us, yeah? And now that we've seen a bit of what it is—of what it's capable of—everything's going to be all right. The beasties have found their chill."

  
  


"You're drunk, Poe," Ben opined from up front. He shot a surreptitious glance at the cab driver, but the man was either not well-versed in English or had perfected the cab driver art of tuning out his passengers' conversations among themselves. He was focused on the bumpy, pothole-ridden road between the sugarcane fields. There was a white rosary dangling from the rear-view mirror, and Ben watched its cross-shaped pendant sway with every lurch against a backdrop of deserted path that lay beyond the windshield, illuminated only by the cab's headlights.

  
  


It happened when they were roughly ten minutes away from the house—the high beams caught a huge black shape standing in the middle of the road, staring directly at the oncoming vehicle.  _ A pig,  _ Ben realized after the initial shock of seeing the creature loom up out of the darkness. He expected the driver to hit the brakes, or at the very least honk and give the animal time to get out of the way—

  
  


Instead, the driver hissed through his teeth, reached up to touch the rosary beads, placed his hand back on the steering wheel, and  _ accelerated,  _ prompting startled cries from the people in the backseat.

  
  


The pig moseyed off to the side at the last possible second, completely unperturbed as it watched the cab roar past.

  
  


"Holy shit," Finn wheezed, just as intoxicated as Poe, "did you see the  _ size  _ of that thing? You could make enough bacon to feed a whole village—"

  
  


"God," Rose moaned, "I really _could_ eat some bacon right now."

  
  


But Ben was thinking only of what Elsie had told them, about how the  _ aswang  _ took the form of a pig or a dog when it was scouting. The logical part of his brain screamed that it was just coincidence, just superstition, just some farmer's pig that had escaped its pen, but the cab driver didn't slow down until they reached the house and, once he'd dropped them off at the front gates, sped away opposite of the direction they'd come from instead of making a U-turn.

  
  


It was a living belief, Threepio had said.

  
  


Back in the house, Rose stayed true to her word and fried up some bacon from the fridge that Breha had stocked especially for their visit. Poe got it into his head to finish off the bottle of sugarcane rum that they'd opened several nights ago, and the group sat around the table in the kitchen and drank and ate and joked around in the glare of white fluorescent lights, and it was— _ fun.  _ That was the word, Ben decided.  _ Fun.  _ Minus all the paranormal shenanigans and his and Rey's charade—minus that creepy fucking pig they'd seen only an hour ago—he was having more fun on this vacation than he'd had in  _ ages.  _ It had been a good idea to get away from the office, even just for a while.

  
  


Or maybe that was the alcohol talking. He'd drunk a lot at the karaoke bar because it was the only thing that made Finn and Poe's renditions of various Celine Dion songs even remotely bearable, and he was going to town on the rum now because it was the only way to put that  _ creepy fucking pig  _ out of his mind.

  
  


Rey ate more than her fair share of the food but stuck to water, as she'd done all night, and when it was time for bed she let out a derisive little snort as Ben stumbled on the third-floor landing and had to lean against her until he regained his balance.

  
  


"Sorry." He wasn't  _ totally  _ wasted, but the word was sluggish on his tongue. Finn, Rose, Poe, and Paige were still at the bottom of the steps, their drunken banter sounding miles away.

  
  


"It's okay, you're on vacation," Rey replied easily enough, but he shook his head.

  
  


"For everything. Sorry for everything." That was what he hadn't done when they broke up—they'd fought and he'd been too angry to apologize. The cutthroat culture at his workplace had drilled it into his head  _ never  _ to apologize. "You matter more to me than anything else in the world, and I forgot that somewhere along the way. I'm sorry."

  
  


Something in Rey's expression went soft. "Let's talk about this when you're not drunk," she suggested, ushering him into their room.

  
  


And later, when they were both lying in bed in their sleep clothes and he rolled onto his side in his stupor and draped a heavy arm across her stomach and nuzzled groggily at the round of her shoulder, she didn't push him away.

  
  


*

  
  


After a week in Chianar, the daily rooster chorus had faded into a kind of aural wallpaper and Ben woke up at a perfectly respectable time the next morning. The crowing had long since ceased and bright golden sunlight poured into the room from the open window on his side of the bed—Rey's window, the balete window, was still as shut as he'd left it yesterday, and he was grateful for that as well as for the fact that he somehow,  _ miraculously,  _ didn't have a hangover.

  
  


Unfortunately, what he  _ did  _ have was a hard-on. Again.

  
  


Rey had turned her back to him in her sleep and he'd curled around her so that his lips were now pressed to her nape. His left arm was wedged between her body and the mattress, the hand attached to it splayed over her left breast, his erection nestled between the globes of her perfect ass. She was awake; he could tell from the tension in her shoulders and her shallow breaths. Her nipple was a taut bead under his palm, under the thin cotton of her shirt.

  
  


Caught in that hazy space halfway between dreams and the waking world, he knew only that he was starving for her. It had been so long.

  
  


Before he was even really aware of what he was doing, Ben stroked Rey's breast through her shirt, massaging it in slow, tentative movements. Focusing on that pert nipple and how it grew even stiffer with each caress. She made no move to stop him. Made no sound until he took her nipple between thumb and forefinger and pinched gently and—

  
  


_"Ah."_

  
  


It wasn't quite a groan and it wasn't quite a sigh. It was just what it was, a rough, breathless,  _ needy  _ little vocalization that instantly fogged his mind with lust upon hearing it. Emboldened, he reached up to fondle her other breast while his free hand blindly tugged his loose sleep pants down his hips, freeing his arousal. And because it had already been established that he was going to hell, he saw no reason to abstain from thanking the plethora of saintly figurines downstairs for the warm weather that had led to Rey wearing nothing but panties and one of her oversized T-shirts to bed as she gasped at the heat of his cock poking between her bare thighs.

  
  


He peppered a trail of kisses from her ear to the base of her neck and rocked his hips against the seat of her ass, teasing her nipples with both hands now while she shuddered and rubbed the soaked gusset of her underwear along his length. This was muscle memory, the way her chest strained into his touch, the way their bodies slid together back and forth, yearning for that sweet friction, yearning for  _ always  _ and  _ more. _

  
  


He didn't know what he was waiting for until it happened. Until she whimpered his name and it sounded like the lewdest kind of grace. His right hand drifted lower again, this time to slip hopelessly eager fingers down her panties, and he stifled a groan at how wet she was, positively  _ dripping  _ all over his palm as he skimmed along her entrance, the pads of his fingers lightly grazing her clit with each stroke. It was the kind of teasing that had always driven her wild and this morning was no exception. She trembled in his arms like live wire.

  
  


Ben wasn't faring much better himself, to be honest. There was a part of him that regarded each second warily, afraid that he would wake up at any moment to find that this had all been just a dream. "I missed you," he murmured into Rey's hair, not even realizing that he'd said anything out loud until she all but  _ melted  _ against him, another little whine escaping from her throat. "I missed this."

  
  


"Me—me, too," she confessed, falteringly. He rewarded her with another pinch to her nipple and a swirl of his fingertips over her clit, and she spasmed against him, a strangled sob wrenched loose from her throat. "Ben,  _ please—" _

  
  


"Please what?" he asked, because he was an asshole, because he  _ needed  _ to hear her say it. Needed this concrete assurance that she still wanted him and all was not lost.

  
  


Rey had always been the less verbal of the two of them, but this time she didn't hesitate. "Fuck me," she whispered, turning her head so that the words were slightly muffled into the pillow. "Please fuck me—need it so bad—" She rolled her hips against his hand as if to illustrate her point—"dreamed of you every night since we broke up—"

  
  


_ Since  _ you  _ broke up with  _ me, Ben almost growled, and it was that flare of residual anger—that sudden flicker of heartache—that caused him to tug her panties to the side and shove his cock into her more roughly than he'd intended.

  
  


Rey cried out in both surprise and relief, her head lolling back against his shoulder to offer him a glimpse of parted lips and eyes fluttering shut. It wasn't long before he was closing his eyes, too, and pressing a sloppy, desperate kiss to the corner of her mouth, utterly overwhelmed by how amazing she felt around him, by how much he had missed having her like this.

  
  


He was content to rock into her with quick, shallow thrusts at first, reveling in her moans of delight, but his eyes flew open when he heard the faraway thud of a door slamming shut further down the hall. His left hand automatically drifted from her breast to cover her mouth. "Sound travels in this old house," he reminded her, his voice a low, unsteady rasp against her cheek. "We have to be quiet, baby. Can you do that? Can you be quiet for me?"

  
  


Rey nodded vigorously and,  _ God,  _ it shouldn't have been so hot—this illicitness, this feeling of doing something forbidden—but it  _ was.  _ It was really,  _ really  _ hot to be fucking secretly in a house full of people and crucifixes and, yeah, he was going to hell, but maybe she'd join him there. She bit a scream into the flesh of his palm as he buried himself inside her to the root, then another when he pulled out and just as deeply and abruptly plowed back in.

  
  


The antique bed  _ creaked. _

  
  


Ben knew he wasn't going to last. It had simply been too long. His dick was too goddamn happy to be home again to stand any chance of holding out against the tight, wet heat that gripped it like a vise.

  
  


But he needed to make Rey come first. He had to—had to  _ remind  _ her that he could make her feel like that, and then maybe—

  
  


— _ Maybe she would take him back— _

  
  


Her spine arched when he thumbed at her clit, her hands flying to her own breasts in a mindless bid for more stimulation, and he couldn't help but grin. She was such a proactive, greedy thing; he'd always loved that about her. "That's right, sweetheart," he hummed against her temple. "Play with those pretty tits while I fuck you—such a good girl, staying so quiet while you take my cock in that tight little cunt—"

  
  


It was choked and gurgling, the noise she made into his palm. It was dark and possessive, the way he sank his teeth into the slope of her neck, giving her the final push she needed to tip over the edge.

  
  


It was beautiful, the way she fell apart. And it was utter bliss when he followed, coming inside her with her name like a prayer on his lips.

  
  


*

  
  


In the glorious, mellow haze of  _ after,  _ they lay on their backs and side by side, staring up at the white canopy above their heads, their breathing tapering from ragged to slower but ever in sync. For Ben, the universe was realigning itself, his toes curled from the lingering waves of pleasure that lapped at his veins. "You..."  _ Are wonderful, are stunning, are the best thing that's ever happened to me.  _ These were the words that he wanted to say, but he felt as piercingly vulnerable as he always did right after sex—which wouldn't have been a problem before, not with Rey, but their breakup was a wound that had yet to heal. As such, it was some latent self-preservation instinct that stoppered his lovesick musings in favor of more practical concerns.

  
  


"You're still—you know—on the pill?" he fumbled, because if she'd stopped taking it they had to go out and get their hands on some Plan B.

  
  


Beside him—at the corner of his eye—Rey's stillness was like the calm before the storm. Her silence that of the grave.

  
  


"Yeah," she said, in a tone so distant that it caused the inside of his head to clamor with warning bells. "Yeah, I am."

  
  


*

  
  


Over the next three days, Rey fell back into keeping Ben at arm's length in private while acting the part of his girlfriend when other people were around, leaving him in a constant state of frustration, of wanting to destroy something. Any attempts to talk to her when they were alone were met only with clipped replies that invariably devolved into the cold shoulder when he persisted.

  
  


Eventually, he stopped persisting.

  
  


She disappeared for hours on end every day, heading out the front gates on foot. One afternoon, she took Rose and Paige with her, and it was only when they returned for dinner and Paige complained that Rey's friend was  _ weird as fuck  _ while passing the chicken  _ adobo  _ to Finn that Ben realized she'd been visiting Dosmit.

  
  


"She's not  _ that  _ weird," Rey argued. "She just doesn't get out much, what with running the store and everything."

  
  


"Yeah, a store no one except us bought anything from the whole time we were there," Rose snorted. "Know why? Because she's  _ weird." _

  
  


Rey pursed her lips. "She's shy. But once you get to know her she's really very interesting."

  
  


"Sorry, who are we talking about?" Poe asked. It was just their group at the dining table, Bail and Breha having left to hold vigil at Agrippa's wake, which they were doing every night now as the date of the funeral drew nearer.

  
  


"Rey's latest charity case," Paige quipped. "Dresses in black from head to toe—"

  
  


"Knew she had a type." Finn shot a pointed glance at Ben.

  
  


"You don't understand," Rose insisted. "Even her  _ chickens  _ are black—like,  _ all  _ of them. She said they tasted better."

  
  


"She also said Rey smells like ripe fruit," Paige added. "Which—isn't that the _weirdest_ thing to say to someone you've just met?"

  
  


_ And it's not even accurate,  _ Ben thought. Because Rey smelled like sugar and lemon drops.

  
  


"Give Dosmit a break, guys," Rey huffed. "She's lonely."

  
  


There was an edge to her voice, and that was all the warning the Tico sisters needed to stand down.

  
  


*

  
  


The power went out the next evening. Ben had shut himself in the library after dinner and was perusing  _ Creatures of Alderaanian Lower Mythology  _ by Zollet Ventor when the lights flickered and suddenly he was reading nothing but a wall of solid black.

  
  


He used his phone's flashlight to navigate out of the library and onto the third floor, where everyone else had gathered out in the hallway, clustering around Breha as she called the power company. Poe had obviously been in the middle of a shower, wearing only a towel wrapped around his waist and his wet mop of dark curls flecked with shampoo.

  
  


Breha hung up with a frown. "Looks like they won't be able to get things working again until tomorrow morning at the earliest. Sorry, kids." She went over to a nearby cabinet and pulled it open, revealing an extensive collection of battery-operated flashlights, emergency lamps, wax candles, and matchboxes.

  
  


Finn whistled. "I'm guessing power outages are a  _ thing?" _

  
  


"Oh, yes." Breha chuckled. "I'm actually surprised it took this long for one to happen during your visit."

  
  


They all retreated to their rooms armed with an assortment of items from Breha's collection. It was nine in the evening, and then time crawled by until it was eleven, and Ben drifted out of a fitful sleep because it was so staggeringly  _ warm.  _ Without the benefit of the electric fan, the heat was at desert levels in terms of temperature, but it was  _ tropical  _ heat. Which meant it was so humid that he was having trouble  _ breathing.  _ He'd long since shucked off his T-shirt and Rey had peeled off her shorts, the two of them avoiding each other's gazes as they did so, but the fidgeting from all the way across the mattress told him that she was just as awake and uncomfortable as he was.

  
  


Eventually, Rey stood up with a tiny groan of abject despair, switched on the emergency lamp that she'd placed on the nightstand, and marched over to the window on her side. Before Ben could stop her, she slid the capiz shell panels open.

  
  


The rush of more fresh air piping in through the screen was a relief, but Ben was  _ not  _ about to spend a dark night in this room with  _ that  _ window open. "Could you shut that again, please?"

  
  


Rey glared at him. "It's too hot."

  
  


"I know, but—" He jerked his head towards the other window, the  _ safe  _ window. "This one's already—"

  
  


"It's not  _ enough.  _ What's the deal with you and this window, anyway? You're always closing it—"

  
  


"Never mind," he snapped, embarrassed by his childhood fears, tired and sweaty and cranky and twisted into knots because of her. "I forgot that things have to be done your way or not at all."

  
  


"What's  _ that  _ supposed to mean?"

  
  


"What do you  _ think  _ it means, Rey?"

  
  


"Whatever." She slammed the window-panels shut. "I'm sleeping somewhere else. Enjoy your fucking sauna." She grabbed one of the flashlights on the antique sewing table, switched off the emergency lamp, and stalked out of the room, leaving him in darkness.

  
  


*

  
  


It took Ben another hour to fall back asleep. He was restless, fuming, his dreams agitated and fast-paced. When his eyes sprang open again, it was three in the morning according to the clock on the wall that gleamed palely in a beam of silver moonlight. Five seconds passed before he could fully register what had woken him up.

  
  


Someone— _ something— _ was knocking on the closed window.

  
  


It wasn't the wind scraping the balete tree's branches against the side of the house. It wasn't some nocturnal animal rooting around, scrabbling at the screen. No, this was a deliberate, measured rhythm of large, bony knuckles rapping on the wooden frame outside.

  
  


Ben's heart rate slowed to an almost non-existent beat. His stomach filled with lead. He lay there, unmoving, listening to the sound echo through the still, dark heat of the rural night.

  
  


_Knock._

  
  


_Knock._

  
  


_Knock._

  
  


_ **THUMP.** _

  
  


A fist—for what  _ else  _ could it be but a fist—crashed into the window frame with all its might, and Ben was scrambling out of bed, was running out of the room, the fear that gripped him that of a nine-year-old boy's on a long-ago summer afternoon and, therefore, bigger than worlds.

  
  


He stumbled down the pitch-black hallway, the eyes in the portraits watching his every move as he rattled one doorknob after another in mindless panic, trying to find a room that was unlocked, a room far away from the balete tree where he could bed down in and wait for morning to come. He nearly gasped in relief when one doorknob finally turned in his shaking hand, and he pushed the door open and—

  
  


— And—

  
  


And the scene that awaited him was etched in moonlight, pouring in brilliant and unfettered through a window that had been flung wide open. Rey was fast asleep in bed, lying on her back with her shirt hitched up far enough over her ribcage to reveal the slight swell of a rounded belly.

  
  


Crouched between her spread thighs was the  _ aswang. _

  
  


It was a skeletal, misshapen thing, the huge leathery wings sprouting from its hunched shoulders silhouetted against the moon that hung low over the treetops outside the window. Its distorted yet eerily human features were tangled in unkempt mats of long, gray-streaked dark hair. Its unhinged jaw stretched far too wide, revealing rows of jagged teeth and a long tongue that was proboscis-like in its slenderness and slick with drool, ending in a sharp point that inched steadily towards Rey's navel.

  
  


_ This isn't happening,  _ Ben thought. The moon's radiance glossed the frozen tableau with a surreal, dreamlike quality, but the spell was quickly broken when the  _ aswang  _ turned its soulless black eyes to him and  _ hissed. _

  
  


A strangled roar tore itself loose from Ben's throat as he charged towards the creature. He had no weapons, no plan—all he knew was that he needed to save Rey. She started awake at the commotion he was making and joined in with a scream of her own; he saw her eyes widening in terror before the  _ aswang' _ s grotesque, twisted shape blocked her from view as it lunged at him, pinning him to the floor with superhuman strength.

  
  


Sharp claws gouged at his naked chest—the pain was beyond comprehension and, indeed, Ben  _ ceased  _ to comprehend it, adrenaline numbing his veins. His balled-up fist smashed into the side of the creature's face and it reeled back for a second—only a second, but enough time for him to surge upwards and lock an arm around its neck in a chokehold.

  
  


The  _ aswang  _ shrugged him off as effortlessly as if he weighed no more than a piece of paper.

  
  


Ben was sent sailing into a full-length mirror on the opposite wall with enough force to break the glass, its myriad shards cutting into his skin. As he lay sprawled on the floor, winded and bleeding, his foe advanced upon him, bat-like wings spread in triumph, fangs bared in a gruesome parody of a smile...

  
  


And that was when Rey hit the back of its head with the bulky, heavy-duty flashlight that she'd brought with her earlier. Metal collided against flesh and bone with a sickening crack, soon followed by the  _ aswang' _ s guttural shriek as it whirled around to face her—

  
  


— And was promptly tackled by Finn, Rose, Poe, and Paige, in a blur of flailing fists and improvised weapons—

  
  


_"Jesus! What the fuck!" _Poe was yelling even as he and Finn body-slammed the monstrous creature into the wall. _"What the shit is this thing—"_

  
  


The  _ aswang  _ shook Finn and Poe off after mere moments, getting in a good raking swat at both while it was at it, and from there it was a vicious tussle as Ben picked himself up off the floor, grabbing the largest shard of broken mirror within reach while Rey swung her flashlight and Rose fended the thing off with a brass candelabra and Paige made do with a chair.

  
  


When his grandparents appeared in the doorway, Ben was seized by a renewed burst of desperation to kill the creature before it could hurt the people he loved. It darted towards Bail and Breha, animal instincts lured by the promise of easier targets, frailer prey, but Ben hurled himself at it, slashing wildly until he managed to dig the glass shard into the back of the  _ aswang' _ s neck.

  
  


It screamed then. A sound that chilled bone and pierced the air. Its claws sank into Ben's shoulder and it flung him at the wall and then it was gone, moving as swiftly as lightning, flying out the window and into the night.

  
  


Ben collapsed, his vision blurring at the edges as blood loss and agony set in. People were talking, were crying, were calling for an ambulance, were gathering around him in the dark.

  
  


But all he saw was Rey.

  
  


She knelt on the floor beside his crumpled body, tears streaming down her cheeks as she stroked his hair. Maybe she still loved him, after all.

  
  


He wanted to touch her face, to assure himself that she was alive and in one piece, to assure  _ her  _ that everything was going to be okay, but he couldn't move his arm for some reason. In the last fading gasps of consciousness, he remembered the swell of her exposed stomach in the moonlight; the loose clothes and the nausea and the not drinking—and how she'd shut down after he asked if she was still on the pill—all of it suddenly made sense. Like puzzle pieces finally clicking into place.

  
  


"You're pregnant," he rasped. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  
  


Rey opened her mouth to speak, but Ben's world went black before he could hear her answer.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And, with this, our spoopy little tale comes to an end. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Reylo fandom would be interested in reading about my weird country and our weird traditions and folklore— I have truly appreciated every bookmark, comment, kudos, tweet, and Tumblr ask, and I hope that this last chapter doesn't disappoint!
> 
> Until we meet again,  
Thea ❤️

Ben lost track of time.

  
  


And of almost everything else, really.

  
  


He knew that he was in the hospital. White sheets, white walls. Sometimes the needle stung when it sank into his veins, sometimes the ointment burned when it was smeared on his wounds.

  
  


Sometimes Rey was there, lightly touching her fingertips to his to avoid the cut that wielding the mirror shard had left on his palm.

  
  


They'd had the  _ devil  _ of a time picking all the glass out, if he recalled correctly.

  
  


His dreams glazed over with morphine.

  
  


When he was more or less alert and sitting up, staring at the wooden crucifix hung on the wall opposite his bed, a month or a year could have passed. However, as Breha informed him when she walked into the room, it had only been three days.

  
  


"The doctor says you can be discharged tomorrow morning." She sat down, gingerly patting the back of his hand. "The others have only minor injuries and they're healing nicely. I don't know  _ what  _ was going on through your heads, launching yourselves at an  _ aswang  _ like that. You didn't have any rosaries, no stingray tails,  _ nothing."  _ She blew out an exasperated breath. "Good thing you managed to get the nape. It can heal itself by licking its wounds when in human form, you know. The nape is one of the spots it can't reach, so I think it's safe to say that, wherever it is now, it's dying."

  
  


_ Dying,  _ Ben noted hazily.  _ Not dead.  _ His brow creased. "Did you—does the doctor  _ know  _ that it was—"

  
  


"Good heavens, of course not." Breha snorted. "I told everyone it was a burglar with a knife. We filed an incident report with the police."

  
  


"I guess living beliefs just don't hold up that well in the face of criminal investigations."

  
  


"No, they don't."

  
  


They were silent for a while, both lost in their own thoughts. Finally, Breha announced, "Bail and I booked you kids on a flight back to Coruscant the day after tomorrow. It's a week earlier than planned, but it's probably for the best."

  
  


Ben scowled. "I'm not leaving you and Gramps here with that  _ thing  _ on the loose—"

  
  


"It's dying, Ben," Breha reminded him. "And, even if it weren't, it won't go back to the house now that we know of its existence. Not if Rey isn't there to lure it anymore. The  _ aswang  _ is naturally attracted to pregnant women. It can smell them from a mile away. That's probably how it found her."

  
  


Fetuses were a delicacy, Elsie had said, and now Ben started to tremble as the weight of all the what-ifs hit him like a blow. What if he'd been too late, what if he hadn't gone into the room Rey had happened to choose for the night, what if he'd lost her—lost  _ them— _

  
  


What if the mysterious knocking hadn't woken him up?

  
  


"Gran," Ben said, because he suddenly just  _ knew,  _ the way he'd known his car's engine was about to die on that lonely highway, the way he'd known he was falling in love with the mechanic who came to fix it, "who lives in the balete tree? Who warned me that Rey was in danger?"

  
  


Breha looked surprised for a moment. And then, like she was proud of him. "As far as we've been able to surmise, that old tree is the home of a  _ kapre  _ and a  _ kaperosa,  _ who share a tentative truce. They were very fond of Leia, although she never had much patience for them while she was growing up and staying in that room. She'd curse at the ghost every time it appeared outside the window and startled her. One day, when she was six years old, I heard her yell at the  _ kapre  _ to stop smoking."

  
  


The mental image startled a laugh out of Ben, and he immediately winced as his ribs ached in protest. "Mom never told me any of this. I got the impression that she didn't really—you know,  _ believe." _

  
  


"She stopped talking about them when she was around ten or eleven. I assumed that they'd stopped manifesting and she eventually forgot."

  
  


"Or she put it behind her," Ben murmured.

  
  


"Perhaps." Breha shrugged. "Your grandfather and I certainly never brought them up again. There are some things that, no matter how real they are, belong only to  _ kamusmusan." _

  
  


"Which means?"

  
  


"Childhood," Breha translated, reaching out to brush Ben's hair away from his forehead. "The age of innocence. As I said, those beings were fond of Leia, and so I assume they were watching over you because you are her son."

Ben let that sink in for a moment— almost treasuring it, in an odd sort of way. "What about Threepio?" he finally asked, figuring that he'd already gotten the ball rolling so he  _ might as well.  _ "What the hell is he?"

Breha made a face of disapproval at his choice of words, but then she shrugged. "In all honesty, no one knows what Threepio is,  _ hijo.  _ He's been around forever. But we're still grateful for him, anyway."

  
  


*

  
  


Rey entered Ben's hospital room a few minutes after Breha left. She approached his bed hesitantly, her normally golden complexion pale and the skin under her eyes bruised with lack of sleep.

  
  


"Beloved," he murmured, and the tense arrangement of her features collapsed into the purest, most exquisite relief as she all but  _ ran  _ to his side and flung her arms around his neck.

  
  


"You're an idiot," she grumbled. "Charging at it with your bare hands, not even wearing a shirt—"

  
  


He smirked against her cheek. "You're the one who hit a shape-shifting evil spirit over the head with a flashlight."

  
  


Rey made a sound that was torn between laughter and tears. He didn't care which of the two, really, as long as her mouth continued lingering at his jaw like that, but unfortunately it wasn't long before she was pulling away to assess him, her gaze flickering over the bandage slanting down one side of his face. He couldn't remember if he'd gotten that particular wound from the broken mirror or from the  _ aswang' _ s claws. He didn't know if it would ever fully heal.

  
  


"So I'm just—I'm just going to say it. All of it." Rey sat down in the chair that had previously been occupied by Breha and lifted her chin in determination. "I learned that I was four months pregnant the week before our trip. I'm not sure how it happened—I know only that I'm going to keep the baby. But you've always made it clear that you didn't want kids and we were already fighting about so many other things, so I panicked. I thought that..." Her hands twisted nervously in her lap. "I was afraid that you would tell me you didn't want to raise a child. I was afraid that you'd break up with me the moment you found out. So I—beat you to the punch, I guess? Because leaving is always better than getting left behind? I don't know." She flashed a wan, self-deprecating smile. "I wasn't really thinking all that clearly. And I guess—I guess I wasn't sure if you'd prioritize the... the  _ situation  _ over your work. I know starting a family was never in your ten-year plan—"

  
  


" _ Fuck  _ the ten-year plan." Ben reached over with his relatively unscathed left hand to pull Rey close and pressed his lips to hers, desperate to kiss away all the sadness and the fear and the pain that he had unwittingly caused. "You're already my family. I'm sorry I made you feel like you weren't. I'll do better—I'll  _ be  _ better. I swear it. I'll take care of you." He kissed her again, his hand drifting downwards to close over the curve of her stomach. " _ Both  _ of you."

  
  


"I'm sorry, too," Rey mumbled against his lips. "I should have told you right from the start. But, Ben—" She pulled away once more, this time with a solemn, beseeching expression. "I don't want us to get back together just because I'm pregnant. That's not fair to all parties involved."

  
  


"I want to get back together because I love you." He squeezed her hand. "I'm willing to start figuring our shit out. Therapy, parenting classes, whatever—whatever is required. Whatever you think will help. I'm willing to do all this and more, if you are."

  
  


"I am," Rey said quickly. "But, I mean, it's such a huge step. Are you—do you even feel  _ ready  _ to be a dad? Or—do you think you'll ever feel ready?"

  
  


"I don't know," Ben admitted. The question alone made him freeze up; his future therapist was going to have their work cut out for them. But it was quite frankly  _ incredible,  _ the clarity of mind that fighting a winged, flesh-eating monster brought. There was nothing he wouldn't do for Rey and for the bean-sized life she carried inside her, the life they'd made  _ together,  _ and— _ Oh, God,  _ is  _ it the size of a bean? What does four months pregnant even mean, anyway, should she be lying down, I know nothing, I'm so fucked— _

  
  


— _ Hope the kid doesn't get my ears— _

  
  


Ben took a deep, meditative breath before he could inner-monologue himself into a panic attack. "I don't know if I'll ever feel ready," he said, bringing Rey's hands to his lips and kissing her knuckles, looking into the future that he saw in her eyes. "All I know is that I'm not letting you do this alone."

  
  


*

  
  


The next day, the shallower cuts on Ben's chest had completely disappeared. The doctor and the nurses looked from his chest to the clipboard and back again, then they removed the sutures on one of the deeper gashes—despite the original plan for Ben to have them taken out in Coruscant next week—only to find that the original wound was nothing more than a thin, pinkish mark. The same held true for all the other stitched-up thoracic lacerations, while the cuts on Ben's hand, back, arms, and legs—the ones he had sustained from the broken mirror—looked like what one would expect four-day-old wounds to look like.

  
  


The beleaguered doctor scratched his head. 

  
  


"Well, what do you expect, Doc?" Ben heard a nurse say as the team drifted out of his room. "It's Chianar..."

  
  


Only Threepio—newly returned from his short vacation—had any real answers when he picked Ben and Rey up in the Tantive. "The  _ aswang  _ is dying," he explained. "As its power ebbs, so do the injuries it has inflicted."

  
  


"Gran said that, too," Ben remembered out loud. "Dying, not dead. Is there a certain time-frame? Can it perish only on the third Friday of the month?"

  
  


Threepio caught Rey's eye in the rear-view mirror. "Funny guy, isn't he?"

  
  


Rey's lips quirked. "He's back to his usual charming self, so I'd say he's good as new."

  
  


*

  
  


On the group's last night in Alderaan, there was a small party in the garden with the household staff and the estate tenants. Bail and Breha had sprung for another  _ lechon.  _ There was also oxtail in thick peanut sauce, skewers of grilled chicken marinated in lime and annatto and vinegar, a dark-colored stew of chili peppers and pig's blood and offal that Ben decided was an acquired taste that he had no interest in acquiring, and, for dessert, the traditional layer cake comprising of buttercream, meringue, and cashew nuts that was known as  _ sans rival. _

  
  


"I'm going to miss the food," Finn declared, sounding near tears. "I'm going to miss the food so, so much."

  
  


"Hard same," Rey agreed, spooning more of the pig's blood stew onto her second helping of rice.

  
  


Finn smirked. "Well, you're eating for two now, aren't you? Congratulations, by the way."

  
  


Rey blushed. Ben had never seen a prettier sight. "Thanks."

  
  


"So." Rose waved her fork in Ben and Rey's direction from across the table. "Does this mean the two of you are back together?"

  
  


Rey froze. Ben choked on his food. "How—how did you—" he sputtered, and Paige rolled her eyes.

  
  


"News flash—we're not, like,  _ totally  _ oblivious," the older Tico admonished. "The two of you were giving each other kicked puppy faces all throughout this trip. It was  _ maddening." _

  
  


"Yeah, it was pretty clear something was up." Finn shook his head mournfully. "Academy Award winners, the two of you are not."

  
  


"But everything's okay now, right?" Poe ventured.

  
  


Rey glanced at Ben, then leaned into his side. He kissed the top of her head, hiding a smile in her hair.

  
  


"Yeah," Rey hummed, sounding content. "Everything's going to be just fine."

  
  


*

  
  


Rose pulled Ben aside as the festivities were winding down. "Well, that was a load of crap," she said without preamble. He shot her a quizzical look and she proceeded to elaborate. "Everything is  _ not  _ fine. You know how we've all been camping out in the living room while you were in the hospital—because, yes, we  _ did  _ attack a monstrously powerful, baby-eating hell-spawn with our bare hands and with, like,  _ furniture,  _ but when it comes down to it we're really just a bunch of scaredy-cats, you know—?"

  
  


"Right."

  
  


"Well," Rose continued apprehensively, "Rey's been having these— _ dreams.  _ Or maybe they're more like nightmares? She doesn't remember a thing once she wakes up and the others haven't noticed, but I kip next to her on the floor and she—she sort of thrashes around and—and  _ says  _ things."

  
  


Ben frowned. "Things such as?"

  
  


_ "Wait for me,"  _ Rose whispered. "That's what I heard her say the first night—the night following the  _ aswang  _ attack. Does she usually talk in her sleep like that? I don't think so, yeah?"

  
  


"She's usually a deep sleeper," Ben confirmed, a slow wash of inexplicable dread creeping down his spine.

  
  


"The next night, she was..." Rose swallowed. "I guess  _ chanting  _ would be the right term. She was chanting something under her breath, something I could hear only because I was right beside her. I didn't get all of it but it went something like—" Her brow furrowed in concentration as she dredged the words up to the surface of her memory.  _ "I have made my home anywhere I still have a name, I swear that they cannot kill us all." _

  
  


There was a certain cadence to those words—a defiance that Ben found both fascinating and frightening all at once. Eventually he and Rose came to the conclusion that it was a good thing they were leaving tomorrow and that they ought to keep an eye on Rey until then.

  
  


As he was making his way back to their table, Ben passed by Threepio and a cluster of tenants. Snatches of conversation drifted to his ears. The tenants had not been informed of the  _ aswang  _ attack on the house, but it turned out they had plenty to occupy themselves with.

  
  


"My dogs were making an unholy racket a few nights ago. Went outside and saw a black pig legging it for the trees. It disappeared before I could catch it, but it looked heavily injured. It was likely a sadistic drunk or junkie or someone took a grudge out on their neighbor's animal, if you ask me."

  
  


"Either that or old Dosmit's licking her wounds right now..."

  
  


The last statement was met with some chuckles, but more than a few people crossed themselves. Threepio noticed Ben hovering and walked over to hand him a beer, which he gladly accepted. The two men drank silently side by side until Ben could bear it no longer.

  
  


"Do you think it was Dosmit, Threepio?" he blurted out.

  
  


Threepio paused, then lowered the beer bottle before he could take his next sip. "Around seventy years ago, there was a young woman who lived around these parts. She was a bit... eccentric, to put it mildly. Had no family, no friends. Talked to herself a lot, shuffled around and didn't make eye contact with anyone, but she was harmless. Then someone’s kid died—was killed, body dumped into the sugarcane fields. The police had no answers and soon enough people started saying it was an  _ aswang  _ who did it. The dead child's father and some of the townspeople went to the woman's house with their torches and their machetes and... well."

  
  


"They killed her?"

  
  


"They were angry and they were scared," Threepio said distantly, "which, of course, is no excuse. It's one of the darker parts of Chianar's history and no one likes talking about it, but we all remember it very well. Now do you understand why I can't tell you if I think it was Dosmit or not?"

  
  


Stunned by what he had just learned about his mother's hometown—about this beautiful, idyllic place—Ben couldn't do anything else but nod.

  
  


"Sometimes it's people who are the monsters. That young woman really was harmless, you know. Still is."

  
  


"What do you..." Ben trailed off, because Threepio had fixed a contemplative gaze on the house over his shoulder.

  
  


Or, rather, what grew beside the house, dark and vast.

  
  


"After they killed her, her spirit came back," said Threepio. "She's the ghost who lives in the balete tree."

  
  


*

  
  


Despite what Rose had told Ben about Rey's strange dreams, the night passed without incident—which was perhaps largely due to the fact that Ben and Rey stayed in their bedroom and talked quietly until they both dozed off.

  
  


He woke up earlier than usual and left her snoring blissfully in bed. His grandparents were already awake, as Breha had bullied her husband into making plans to go into town and buy presents for Leia and everyone else they knew in Coruscant, and Ben sat down to one last breakfast with them. Afterwards, when Bail and Breha had left with Threepio and with nothing else to do since he'd already packed his bags the day before, Ben wandered into the library and retrieved the book he'd been in the middle of reading when the power went out.

  
  


_ "Imaginary creatures depicted in a people's lower mythology are one of the most important phenomena in their belief systems,"  _ Zollet Ventor had written.  _ "The common folk in particular must strive to maintain harmonious relations with these creatures, a continuous process that permeates many aspects of their everyday lives."  _ The work was a taxonomic classification of folkloric beings, and Ben soon discovered that the section on the  _ aswang  _ was only a few pages away from where he'd previously left off.

  
  


There was probably some irony in that.

  
  


He read on. For kicks, maybe, or in an attempt to finally understand. He wasn't sure.

  
  


But it wasn't long before a particular passage snagged at his heart like a loose nail, chilling his blood.

  
  


_ "It has a peculiar liking for fetuses and are said to find their quarry by the scent of the mother, which to the  _ aswang  _ smells like ripe jackfruit. No matter how mortal the wound, this shape-shifter cannot die until the chick it ingested prior to its first transformation process is removed. This removal most commonly takes place when the dying  _ aswang  _ transfers the chick to someone else whom it has entranced. Upon swallowing the chick, this person will then become a new  _ aswang.  _ And so it goes..." _

  
  


The book fell from Ben's numb fingers. He ran out of the library and up the stairs to his and Rey's room.

  
  


She was gone.

  
  


*

  
  


"We don't have any weapons!" Finn groaned three minutes into their group's frantic race to Dosmit's house.  _ "Again!" _

  
  


"We don't need them," Ben snarled. Dosmit was weakened, she was dying—but she  _ couldn't  _ die. Not until she had transferred her power to someone else.

  
  


"I think it was this way," Paige muttered when they reached a fork in the road, jerking her head to the left. They continued running and—"Yes, there it is—"

  
  


Dosmit's house was completely indistinguishable from the other tin-roofed residences that lined the street, save for a little stall out front that displayed a humble assortment of chips, candy, and soda. The main door of the house had been locked but Ben, Finn, and Poe immediately set to breaking it down without a second thought, and as the wood gave way at their kicks and blows, there was a tiny part of Ben's mind that wryly pointed out they were going to get arrested if he was wrong about the whole thing.

  
  


But he wasn't wrong.

  
  


Not a single strand of daylight permeated the boarded-up windows in the cramped and musty den, a hoarder's trove of rustic talismans and mounted bones and strange things brined in glass jars. There was, however, a circle of candles on the floor, flickering in the breeze that blew in through the newly opened doorway as they filled the air with the heady odor of rank-smelling herbs.

  
  


And, inside the glowing, fiery circle, Rey was on her knees, hazel eyes clouded, caught in a waking dream. In front of her, Dosmit crouched on all fours like an animal, blood dripping from the gash on her nape and spattering the wooden floorboards. She was deathly pale, her eyes as dark as a starless night, and the inhumanly long and slender tongue that extended from between her cracked, bluish lips was not empty. A small, black shape was perched on top of it, feathers glistening with spit and bile as if it had crawled its way out of her throat. It emitted a guttural chirp as it hopped along the leathery bridge that was Dosmit's tongue, towards Rey's open, waiting mouth.

  
  


As he charged towards them, Ben felt like he was moving through water. He was too slow. He would be too late. An eternity passed before he stumbled over the ring of candles, knocking a few of them down.

  
  


And everything was quick, so quick, to catch fire.

  
  


*

  
  


Rey let out a sharp gasp when Ben screamed her name, as if she were snapping out of a trance. She turned her head towards him. Their eyes met as the world filled with smoke.

  
  


*

  
  


She was shaking when he dragged her out of the burning house, her wobbly steps helped along by Finn, Rose, Poe, and Paige. Ben looked back only once. Just in time to see Dosmit crumple to the ground, lifeless, finally free. Just in time to see the small, black, feathery silhouette disappear into the golden flames.

  
  


*

  
  


"Dear, you bought too much stuff." Bail Organa's tone of patient reprimand wafted into the living room as the front door creaked open. "You can't expect the kids to schlep those two humongous cardboard boxes all the way to Coruscant."

  
  


"They can just check them into the cargo hold!" Breha retorted. "And, anyway, airports have porters—" She stopped in her tracks at the sight of her guests milling around with singed clothes and faces tracked with soot. " _ Susmaryosep— _ what on  _ earth—" _

  
  


Ben sighed from where he was sitting on the couch while Rey tended to a burn on his arm. "I'm going to need a vacation from this vacation, Gran."

  
  


*

  
  


It was late afternoon, almost time to head to the airport and catch the evening flight. Ben was giving their room a final once-over to make sure nothing important had been left behind while Rey finished packing in that messy, haphazard way of hers that always drove him nuts.

  
  


"I just—I just felt this connection to her," she muttered, shoving wadded-up underwear and socks into her suitcase. "She was so lonely and she didn't fit in, so aside from feeling sorry for her I could also relate, you know? And it was nice to be able to talk to someone about the breakup and the baby and—and everything else, really."

  
  


"I drove you right to her." Ben passed a weary hand over his face. "I'm sorry. I'll spend the rest of my life making it up to you. If you'll let me."

  
  


Rey smiled a little at that. "It's not like I was completely blameless." She motioned him over and he obediently sat on the lid of the suitcase so she could zip it shut. "We'll figure it out. Together."

  
  


"Together," Ben agreed with a smile of his own. He got to his feet and they left the room, luggage wheels gliding behind them.

  
  


*

  
  


"We'll see you next year," Bail told Ben as they hugged on the front steps of the house. "Your grandmother and I were talking about how nice it would be to visit Coruscant."

  
  


"Yes, I'm sure the tourist sights are your only motive," Ben deadpanned.

  
  


"I heard that the Senate Gardens are a real wonder to behold." Bail's words were belied by the wide grin stretching across his face. "We'll drop by to see our great-grandchild if the itinerary isn't too packed."

  
  


"Oh, that baby is going to be the most adorable in all the world!" Breha gushed, kissing Rey's cheek and then Ben's. "I can't wait." She went on to hug the rest of the group one by one. "See you, my darlings. See you all again soon."

Bail walked Ben to the car so that they could have a moment alone. Outside the passenger door, he studied Ben for a moment before nodding in farewell. "You are a good grandson," he pronounced with solemn affection. "You will be a good father."

Ben smiled wanly. "Thank you, Gramps."

  
  


*

  
  


Still obviously exhausted from her ordeal, Rey fell asleep practically the moment she climbed into the Tantive. As Threepio steered out of the driveway, Finn and Rose loudly started placing bets on whether Poe would end up falling out the back due to the massive cardboard boxes taking up space and whether Paige would jump to save him—or just laugh and film it for their vlog.

  
  


From where he was seated up front, Ben merely shook his head at his friends' ridiculous discussion. He glanced at the side mirror as the car pulled away from the house.

  
  


And there they were.

  
  


Reflected in the glass, high up in the leafy mazes of the balete tree, was the same black-haired woman he had seen outside the window long, long ago. The  _ kaperosa,  _ stab wounds blooming like red petals on her white, white dress. She was standing on one of the branches and staring after the car . Behind her lurked a much larger silhouette, lounging against the tree trunk as it casually smoked a cigar clamped between gigantic fingers... fingers that were capable of forming a fist big enough to rattle a house's windows in the night.

  
  


As Ben watched, the ghost girl met his gaze in the mirror. She lifted a pale hand in the gathering twilight and waved goodbye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Star Wars References:**
> 
> [Zollet Ventor](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Zollet_Ventor).
> 
> **Philippine References:**
> 
> What they ate at the farewell party: [kare-kare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kare-kare), [inasal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_inasal), [dinuguan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinuguan), [sans rival](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans_rival).
> 
> The introduction from the book that Ben was reading is from [Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology](https://www.amazon.com/Creatures-Philippine-Lower-Mythology/dp/1530389992) by Maximo D. Ramos.
> 
> _Susmaryosep_ is an interjection, short for "Jesus, Mary, Joseph!"
> 
> **Other References:**
> 
> _I have made my home anywhere I still have a name, I swear that they cannot kill us all_ is a line from the poem ["Sunday, I-80"](https://www.upthestaircase.org/hanif-willis-abdurraqib.html) by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib.


End file.
